st: Suggestion for -confirm var- option

[Kaleb Michaud <kaleb@stanford.edu>]

I just spent some time trying to debug a program, when I realized that the 
-confirm var- command does not require the variable to be spelled out fully.

For example, suppose you have a program that looks to see if the variable 
"car" exists.  If it doesn't, it creates or merges it in.  But, if I have a 
variable called cartoon and not car in the data:

. confirm var car

gives us _rc == 0 even though the var car doesn't exist and the var cartoon 
does.  Any way that the Stata powers that be could add an "exact" option 
such that the varlist that it is confirming must have exact variable syntax 
provided?  I think this is often an issue when dealing with varlists - I 
know, just change the var names, but sometime this isn't an option.

I and I'd imagine others would appreciate it!

Kaleb Michaud
Arthritis Research Center

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