I agree with Richard and, although it
may not seem like it, with Lars.
It is standard Stata philosophy that
changing your data, even minutely, is
a big deal, and you should not be
able to do that without saying so
quite explicitly. Nor can you
abbreviate any commands that do that.
But -recode- manifestly _is_ a
command for changing data, and fits
this philosophy exactly.
So Stata agrees with Lars.
Nick
[email protected]
Richard Williams
> >I don't think it's Stata-like to replace an existing value without
> >an explicit command. "recode" does that by default see:
> >
> >. sysuse auto
> >(1978 Automobile Data)
> >
> >. recode weight (1/1999 = 1) (1999/.=2)
> >(weight: 74 changes made)
> >
> >I don't think this is a good idea, because it is often used by stata
> >novices. I would suggest to change that.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean. -recode- is an explicit command, as is
> -replace-. I suppose you could change -recode- to include a
> -replace- option. But at some point you just have to trust users to
> know what they are doing. If anything, I feel like Stata protects me
> a little too much sometimes, e.g. if I ruled the world there might
> just be a -gen- command, not -gen- and -replace-.
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