Re: st: combining tables

[Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org>]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Nick Cox wrote:

> The short answer seems to me to be that most of the activity over the
> last decade has come from users.
>
> I think many Stata users would agree that we need "Better tables", but
> once you start to talk about details, disagreement about what that
> means becomes more prominent.

Surely the fact that SAS humbled itself to adopt the syntax and semantics 
of the Table Production Language is a strong indication that TPL is 
appropriate way to implement tables in a statistical package. Other 
packages are difficult and won't create the tables that are typically seen 
in publications. TPL can produce those tables. TPL may be difficult, but 
that only because the SAS documentation emphasizes fancy formatting issues 
to the near exclusion of explanatory material on the basic issue of what 
numbers are being calculated. If Bill Gould wrote 10 pages of explanation, 
it would be easy for users to create what they need. To create publication 
ready photo-perfect pages would take a lot more explanation, of course.

dan feenberg
NBER

> (I'm oddly reminded of Quine's quirky quip about the ontological
> problem, for which see (e.g.)
>
> <http://sfcmadrid.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/quine-on-what-there-is.pdf>
>
> I want to admit that I don't understand anything much after the first
> paragraph, but the first paragraph is what applies here.)

It appears to be an argument against the legitimacy of the concept of 
zero. I think most Stata users would be hard to convince.

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