Pine compilation and execution errors

Script requesting too many securities

The maximum number of securities in script is limited to 40. If you declare a variable as a security function call and then use that variable as input for other variables and calculations, it will not result in multiple security calls. But if you will declare a function that calls security - every call to this function will count as a security call.

It is not easy to say how many securities will be called looking at the source code. Following example have exactly 3 calls to security after compilation:

Script could not be translated from: null

Usually this error occurs in version 1 pine scripts, and means that code is incorrect. Pine of version 2 (and higher) is better at explaining errors of this kind. So you can try to switch to version 2 by adding a special attribute in the first line. You’ll get line 2: no viable alternative at character '$'

line 2: no viable alternative at character ’$’

This error message gives a hint on what is wrong. $ stands in place of string with script title. For example:

Mismatched input <…> expecting <???>

Same as no viable alternative, but it is known what should be at that place. Example:

line 3: mismatched input 'plot' expecting 'end of line without line continuation'

To fix this you should start line with plot on a new line without an indent:

Loop is too long (> 200 ms)

We limit the computation time of loop on every historical bar and realtime tick to protect our servers from infinite or very long loops. This limit also fail-fast indicators that will take too long to compute. For example, if you’ll have 5000 bars, and indicator takes 200 milliseconds to compute on each of bars, it would have result in more than 16 minutes of loading.

It might be possible to optimize algorithm to overcome this error. In this case, algorithm may be optimized like this:

Script has too many local variables

This error appears if the script is too large to be compiled. A statement var=expression creates a local variable for var. Apart from this, it is important to note, that auxiliary variables can be implicitly created during the process of a script compilation. The limit applies to variables created both explicitly and implicitly. The limitation of 1000 variables is applied to each function individually. In fact, the code placed in a global scope of a script also implicitly wrapped up into the main function and the limit of 1000 variables becomes applicable to it. There are few refactorings you can try to avoid this issue:

can be сonverted into:

Pine cannot determine the referencing length of a series. Try using max_bars_back in the study or strategy function

The error appears in cases where Pine wrongly autodetects the required maximum length of series used in a script. This happens when a script’s flow of execution does not allow Pine to inspect the use of series in branches of conditional statements (if, iff or ?), and Pine cannot automatically detect how far back the series is referenced. Here is an example of a script causing this problem:

In order to help Pine with detection, you should add the max_bars_back parameter to the script’s study or strategy function:

You may also resolve the issue by taking the problematic expression out of the conditional branch, in which case the max_bars_back parameter is not required:

In cases where the problem is caused by a variable rather than a built-in function (vwma in our example), you may use the Pine v4 max_bars_back function to explicitly define the referencing length for that variable only. This has the advantage of requiring less runtime resources, but entails that you identify the problematic variable, e.g., variable s in the following example:

This situation can be resolved using the max_bars_back function to define the referencing length of variable s only, rather than for all the script’s variables:

When using drawings that refer to previous bars through bar_index[n] and xloc = xloc.bar_index, the time series received from this bar will be used to position the drawings on the time axis. Therefore, if it is impossible to determine the correct size of the buffer, this error may occur. To avoid this, you need to use max_bars_back(time, n). This behavior is described in more detail in the section about drawings.