Ulrich Kohler
>
> Nick Winter wrote:
> > In general, my basic reaction to the recent threads on
> this sort of
> > thing is that Stata is not perl, and so is not really the
> greatest tool
> > for this sort of thing.
>
> I aggree. The advantage of Stata is that everybody who
> works with Stata has
> Stata, but not everybody who works with Stata has perl or awk.
>
True, but I will point out, as others
will even more vociferously, that Perl
(for example) is (a) totally free and
(b) available for every platform on which Stata runs,
and indeed many more. So this is true
only to the extent that people have
not downloaded readily available software.
The real limit is not what is to hand
in practice, or in principle:
it is how far people have the time and
inclination to put in the effort to learn
extra software.
Yet another approach, not yet mentioned
in this thread, is the use of good text
editors. For example, I write far fewer
scripts in Awk or Perl than I used to partly
because my favourite text editor vim
lets me do so many things on the fly,
especially with regular expressions.
But not everything, of course...
All this doesn't stop me wanting, like
I guess all others in this thread, to
be able to specify within Stata that I
want to read a line of text from a
file and/or to write a line of text to a
file absolutely as is with no interpretation
of macros. That is, the desire is for something
like
file lread handle [specs]
file lwrite handle [specs]
where -lread- and -lwrite- indicate something
like a _l_iteral read and write.
I don't know exactly how easy that is to
do, but it is easy to ask for.
Nick
[email protected]
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