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RE: st: RE: forvalues problem


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: RE: forvalues problem
Date   Thu, 1 Aug 2002 11:21:27 +0100

Fred Wolfe
> 
> Nick writes further
> 
> >A quite different comment is that it's not clear
> >why you need the { } around the macro name in that position.
> 
> It is not clear to me either, but running the program 
> without braces produced:
> 
> - forvalues j = 1 / 2 {
> - forvalues k = 1 / $catvar`j'_totline {
> invalid syntax
>    di "`k'. ${catvar`j'vname"`k'}"
> r(198);
> 

That was a red herring of mine. Fred does need them
for what he is doing. 

Imagine you are Stata. You try to make sense 
of a command line from left to right, but following 
your punctuation rules, including parsing 
on spaces. Given 

forvalues k = 1 / $catvar`j'_totline {

the tokens 

forvalues k = 1 / 

all make sense. So far, so good; this is fun. Now 
the next token starts with "$", evidently the start 
of a global name. To you the global name is maximally 

$catvar 

because "`" signifies the start of a _local_ name: 
you must change your mind about what you are interpreting.
Now the global 

$catvar

is not known to you, so you just blank it out here. 
That's the standard rule for undefined macros. 
The local 

`j' 

is known to you. It has contents "1". The next characters
are 

_totline { 

and the line as a whole now is 

forvalues k = 1 / 1_totline {

which is illegal. Squawk! 

To put it more concisely: what we need is to insist that 
Stata evaluates `j' before evaluating $catvar`j'_totline and that 
what's the braces do. 

But as said, Stata can get confused by those braces 
and they should be put on a different line. 

Having said all that, I find that I use globals very 
little in programming. That's partly a question of 
style, but there are some arguments for it. 

forvalues k = 1 / `catvar`i'_totline' { 

would cause none of these problems, I think. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

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