Richard's right to suspect that it's impossible
to write "forever". He's also very right that
StataCorp makes no guarantee to pay attention
to unofficial variants on its own official commands,
unless they are work-arounds for blatant bugs or
misfeatures and suitably publicised.
In practice, however, the kind of
problem he writes about is fairly rare. If
you look in the program files, you'll find many
examples where what is done depends on the
calling version. This is the way you get
oldstyle graphics, for example.
Nick
[email protected]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Richard
> Williams
> Sent: 19 January 2004 13:28
> To: [email protected]; [email protected]
> Subject: Re: st: RE: Version number in ado files
>
>
> At 10:12 AM 1/19/2004 +0000, Nick Cox wrote:
> >Bluntly, this depends -- partly -- on how far one cares
> >about making one's programs available to others.
> >Richard has himself put stuff on SSC, so he does
> >care. I also put stuff on SSC, so I care, although
> >in practice life is sometimes too busy to accommodate
> >all possible users.
>
> Thanks Nick, Ben, Scott and others. I imagine this open
> system where
> anyone can write their own programs creates headaches for
> Stata as it tries
> to maintain compatibility across versions. I wonder if you
> really can be
> sure that using the version number command will maintain
> compatibility? Suppose, for example, I write something
> today in 8.2, but
> it calls an ado file that gets changed in 9.0? I imagine
> Stata works hard
> to avoid problems with the stuff it releases, but
> user-written routines
> might not be so careful about not breaking something. Nick
> cautioned me
> that the seemingly minor changes I made in my -pcorr2-
> command might not
> automatically be embraced as an official part of Stata, and
> I'm beginning
> to understand why.
>
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