st: RE: Problems with outtable

[Roger Newson <roger.newson@kcl.ac.uk>]

At 06:55 30/01/04 -0500, Richard Williams wrote:
> At 11:50 AM 1/30/2004 +0000, Nick Cox wrote:
> > Stata is objecting to lines of the form
> >
> > if <condition> { <action> }
> >
> > as the braces are no longer allowed
> > in such single-line statements. I'll send
> > a version to Kit Baum, the author,
> > with this fixed.
> I thought that if you used the version command, you were supposed to be 
> able to avoid problems like this.  Are there known exceptions to this, or 
> was this just an instance where Stata inadvertently failed to maintain 
> backward compatibility?
I myself had problems with this feature many years ago. I think you'll find 
that StataCorp never intended to make

if <condition> { <action> }

legal in the first place, and the fact that it ever was legal was itself a 
mistake on their part. (Another mistake of theirs was to include an illegal 
construct of this nature in the manuals under -[P] if-, which is there to 
this day at the bottom of Page 218 of the Stata 8 programming manual.)

In Stata syntax, there should always be a statement delimiter between any 2 
statementss, and a right brace } is itself a statement. The statement 
delimiter can be either a newline or a semicolon, depending on whether you 
set the delimiter by

#delimit cr

or by the alternative

#delimit ;

(See the programming manual under -[P] #delimit-.) In the latter case, you 
may have a line in the program

if <condition> {; <action> ; };

and in the former case, you must replace the semicolons with newlines, as in

if <condition> {
 <action>
}

Which #delimit you choose depends on whether you find it a greater effort 
to remember the semicolon at the end of every statement or to "comment out" 
the newline at the end of every non-ultimate line of every multi-line 
statement.

I hope this helps.

Roger


--
Roger Newson
Lecturer in Medical Statistics
Department of Public Health Sciences
King's College London
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Tel: 020 7848 6648 International +44 20 7848 6648
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Email: roger.newson@kcl.ac.uk
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Opinions expressed are those of the author, not the institution.

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