Thank you, Nick, your point on indentation convention is well taken.
I use a tabwidth of only 2 spaces in my editor, a habit I acquired
when writing deeply nested xhtml to prevent exactly the "march off the
right side" of which you speak. Consequently the additional indent on
the else doesn't over-indent my code in practise. However,
semantically, the if and else are at an equivalent level and should
share the same indent, so I may have to reconsider my habit in light
of your assertion that it may be less clear to other Stata
programmers.
While I agree with the assertion that complex code is complex, i
believe an alternative to deeply nested ifs would be welcome to many,
I think, and only wanted to spark some discussion. We have seen the
-for- construct mature in functionality from the original for to
today's -foreach- and -forvalues-. Before they were introduced
someone like me must have said, "I wish...".
I should like to add that the other construct with utility similar to
do case is the combination in some languages of else & if (elseif)
such that:
if #1 {
do something
}
elseif #2 {
do something else
}
elseif #3 {
do something else entirely
}
You actually can use -else if- in Stata, achieving a similar utility:
if #1 {
do something
}
else if #2 {
do something else
}
else if #3 {
do something else entirely
}
On the subject of text editors, a number of (free) editors (Crimson,
Notepad++, SciTE, for example) can be configured to automatically mark
nested code and also include provisions for "code-folding" - the
collapsing of a block of code between braces - a feature helpful in
writing long (a)do files.
DCE
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