.zip as a particular format appears very common on Windows
platforms, but I believe can be less much common on Macs and on
Unixes. That of course is no reason not to develop something
for users of .zip files.
zip is readily accessible under Unix, and since Stata 8 only supports Mac
OS X (which is Unix), this is not an issue for Mac users. But .zip is not
as attractive as .gzip, in the sense that a zipfile is potentially an
archive. The trick I suggested in my last posting will not work with a
zipfile with multiple components, since you need then to specify which
component is to be extracted. .gzip format (which is based on the GNU open
source license) is more straightfoward here, since it only stores a single
file in gzipped format. (It is possible to concatenate files into a single
.gz, but that is not the common mode of use).
