st: error message about Mata memory

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Nick said

Kit deleted the posting by Shihe Fan to which
my posting was the reply. Shihe's posting was clearly
about Stata. Despite the name of the thread, Shihe
made a comment picking up something Bobby Gutierrez
said (about -xtmixed-, a Stata command).

The story with Mata is indeed different and something
like tracing I presume to be a matter Mata masters
and mistresses will have on their amenda. In fact, it is
surely a priority for MataCorp.



Indeed, I did not repeat the posting by Mr Fan, but Mr Fan's concern  
was that the error reporting was 'not specific' -- that is, errors  
thrown by Mata (which generated the original posting) were not linked  
to a line in the Mata source code. That is indeed true, and the error  
trace provided by Stata for Mata errors is 'not specific', as I  
mentioned---unlike the specificity that would arise from a program  
written in C or Fortran, for instance. "set trace" is not very useful  
when ado-files invoke Mata functions. In Robby's response, xtmixed (a  
Stata command implemented as an ado-file) calls Mata functions, but  
if an error occurs within the Mata function, little information is  
available.


Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


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