One thing in Stata that irks me is the treatment of missing values. Stata (IMO) does not handle missings consistenly. For example, if I issue a regression command, missings are recognised as missings and these values are not included in the regression. However, if I type
gen x=1 if (y>10)
then x has the value 1 even if y is missing. In other words, Stata treats as a real value. It's a problem that's easy to solve, but if you forget to include "& y!=.", you can create problems further down the line. Other statistical packages get this right.
I simply don't understand the philosophy behind the design decision. Can anyone explain it?
Regards
Joseph
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