> Dick Campbell
> > This all may be an oversight or a failure on my part to see
> > the obvious, but
> > in general, I find the distinction between -gen- and -egen-
> > to be confusing.
> > It would seem logical that all of this stuff could be handled
> > by -gen-. But
> > -gen- is not accessible to users, being a built in command,
> > while -egen- is and
> > various users have added various things to it. Thus, I guess
> > the reason for
> > -egen- is that it is user accessible, not that it has some
> > special status
> > relative
> > to -gen-. To a new user, however, and even to more experienced ones,
> > this is all a bit confusing.
Besides the accessibility to end users, there is another difference between
the two. -egen- function are, well, egen-functions. They are available only
for -egen- and at no other place in Stata world. -gen-, on the other hand,
expects an expression behind the equal sign (gen varname = <exp>). The
expression can be any Stata function, and have their place at quite some
other places of the Stata world (if <exp>, local macname = <exp>, `=<exp>',
twoway function y = <exp>, if <exp> { ; else if <exp>).
As a consequence, if you learn to generate a specific variable with a specific
egen function, you learn how to generate a specific variable with that
specific -egen- function. If you learn to generate the same variable with
-gen- and Stata-functions you learn something that can be also used outside
the specific problem. This clearly does not help new users with their
confusion. However when teaching Stata one should not forget it.
BTW there is a similar situation with macros. The standard definition of
macros is -local macname = <exp>-, and there is a second list of functions
that are only available for macros, namely the extended macro function.
Syntax here is -local macname: <extended fcn>-. In direct analogy, one might
bond -gen- with -egen- by using -gen varname = <exp>-, and -gen varname :
<egen-fcn>. I don't know whether this would be less confusing for new users.
In addition this brings the problem of continuity and consistency back in.
Uli
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