Re: st: Re: Problem with variable names using Insheet

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

I believe you on SAS practices, naturally.

In terms of Stata history, I think this could only be answered by Bill
Gould or another developer with a long memory. In the early days of
Stata, small changes such as minor new official commands were I think
often sparked by questions or ideas from users. Now the terrain has
shifted because it is easier to write what you want for oneself.

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 14 May 2013 13:46, Joseph Coveney <stajc2@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nick Cox wrote:
>
> Not so curious if you think about the history. When variable names
> could not be very long (originally an 8 character limit) it no doubt
> seemed more obvious that groups of variables could be managed by
> having the same prefix. Managing suffixes too would have been a
> stretch, although not illogical.
>
> -renpfix- was added as an official command some years before -rensfix-
> (STB) was published as a user-written command. As you made clear
> earlier in the thread, both are superseded for Stata 12 users by the
> new -rename-.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I don't know;  over the years, I've received innumerable SAS transport 5 files
> to work on, which have the same restriction on the length of variable names.
> Clients seemed to choose suffixes about as often as they did prefixes despite
> the limit.  Perhaps -renpfix- was mainly to deal with initial underscores.
>
> Joseph Coveney
>
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