At 11:29 AM 3/26/2009, Nick Cox wrote:
An old joke, which I know from Woody Allen, has two people grumbling:
"The food here is terrible!"
"And such small portions!"
That's an old one. Probably predates Woody Allen.
Everyone on this list has no doubt been frustrated at least some of
the time by terse error messages from Stata. But the positive side
is that this is really complimentary: Stata is assuming that you are
smart enough to figure it out. And sometimes a longer message would
just seem patronising and not really helpful. Imagine that "syntax
error" were replaced by
"I'm sorry, but I can't figure out what you mean by this code. There
is an error in it somewhere. You should look at it again or ask any
Stata expert you know. Or you could email Statalist or
[email protected] for help."
I've seen some output from SPSS, and there are some error messages
that come close to that.
--David
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