Re: st: Royston's mvis ado and version questions

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu>]

At 09:21 PM 9/28/2004 -0400, Dave Purcell wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A few questions:
>
> 1) I just installed Patrick Royston's mvis ado (and related files) and
> tried to run it, but I'm getting a "version 8 not supported" error. Is
> it safe to assume I can't use this with the version 7 I'm running (Born
> 08 Aug 2001)?
>
> 3) Is there a way to tell if an ado file requires a certain version?
> I've looked through the FAQs and haven't come across an answer.
Stata recommends that you specify the version of Stata you are using at the 
top of programs and do-files that you write.  Hence, somewhere early on in 
an ado file you'll see a line like

version 8.2

Try to run that program in an earlier version of Stata and you'll get 
errors like you saw.

Now, it is always possible that the program would work fine with an earlier 
version of Stata.  So, you could try making a copy, changing the version to 
7, and see what happens.  But, keep in mind that (a) it may not work at 
all, because it requires version 8 features, and (b) worse still, it may 
seem to work but give the wrong answers.  The author will typically only 
have tested it with the version of Stata they happen to have, so there are 
no guarantees if you try it with a lower level version.

So, I suppose you could try to hack the programs; but if you did, I'd 
suggest making sure you run them on problems with known results to see if 
it seemed to be working correctly.  I don't know anything about -mvis- but 
I see that it deals with missing data, so one immediate concern I would 
have is whether it is dependent on the changes in MD that were made in 
version 8.

-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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