Re: st: RE: Critique on comment syntax and suggestions

[Steven Samuels <sjsamuels@gmail.com>]

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I've been bitten in the past by omitting semicolons. I now use  
continuation characters, and reserve the semicolon to delimit single  
commands, especially for graphs, that have many, often long, options.  
I find such commands easier to read and modify if each option is on a  
single line. If I use continuation characters in such commands, the  
lines look messy unless I line the characters up. For me that's too  
much work. As Nick said, it's personal taste.

Bryce, you are asking Stata's do-file editor to find syntax errors,  
and I don't think that's its function.  After reading the second post  
David referred to (it's by Joseph Coveney), I don't really see a bug.  
Off topic, "Stata" is spelled "Stata." See the FAQ Section 8.2.

Steve

On Jan 28, 2011, at 12:51 PM, Nick Cox wrote:

Thanks for the reference.

On this point I think it mostly boils down to personal taste.

The history is simple: the original developers of Stata were highly
active and experienced C programmers before they ever invented Stata.
I suspect this detail was for their use when so inclined, and not just
for users outside the company. However, the publicly visible house
style of StataCorp is to use #delimit ; very sparingly. But that has
no implications for anyone else.

But if I follow Bryce correctly there is a small bug in the do-file
editor, which regardless of taste is an action point for StataCorp.

Nick

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 5:38 PM, David Radwin <dradwin@mprinc.com>  
wrote:
> Bryce,
>
> I was tripped up by the interaction of semicolon delimiters and  
> comments
> recently, too, as were others in the past, before the built-in  
> editor had
> syntax highlighting:
>
> http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-11/msg01338.html
> http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-09/msg01271.html
>
> But there is another solution: don't use semicolon delimiters, even  
> if you
> are accustomed to using them in other software.
>
> Nick Cox makes this point in "Suggestions on Stata programming style"
> (Stata Journal 2005, vol 5, Number 4, pp. 560-566).
> http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.html?articlenum=pr0018

Mason, Bryce

> > Although not a question, thought this might be of interest as a
> "gotcha."
> > I was stymied by poor commenting practice but also by STATA's  
> > inflexible
> > color coding of comments. Consider the following:
> >
> > # delimit ;
> > * This next line won't get processed because I forgot to put a  
> > semicolon
> > drop if criticalvar=1;
> >
> > Unfortunately, STATA's do-file editor inappropriately colors the line
> with
> > the drop command as if it will be processed, even though the  
> > delimiter
> was
> > not applied to the comment line. It would be great if the do-file  
> > editor
> > knew that we were using a semicolon and made that whole section green
> > until it encountered a semicolon, but I do not see this being easily
> > implemented.
> >
> > We will be moving our standard commenting practice to /* and */ in  
> > order
> > to avoid this issue.
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