Order Stata
Programming features
Programming features 
- Sophisticated parsing
- Looping and branching
- Markup and control language
- Access to internal system variables
- Binary and text file I/O
- ODBC/SQL support
- Access to files on the Internet
- List processing
- Path and file utilities
- Extensive set of functions for string and data manipulation, including regular expressions and Unicode
- Window management
- Automation
Object-oriented programming
- Inheritance
- Encapsulation of data structures and programs
- Program-name overloading
Menu language
- Add items to existing menus
- Add new menus
- Create dialog interfaces
Long string/BLOB support
- Up to 2,000,000,00-character long strings
- Binary "string" (BLOBs)
- Import entire files into BLOBs/long strings
- Export files from BLOBs/long strings
Unicode support
- UTF-8
- Translation of extended ASCII to UTF-8
- Unicode-aware string functions
- Locale-based sorting and string comparison
Watch Unicode in Stata.
Project Manager
- Handle dozens or hundreds of scripts at once
- Portable project file/collections for working on multiple computers or sharing with colleagues
Numerics by Stata
- Create applications with the power of Stata inside them; see the Numerics by Stata page for more information.
Programming utilities for...
- Debugging programs
- Measuring convergence
- Marking relevant sample
- Storing results
- Handling time-series variables
- Confirming variable types
- Controlling display formats
- Parsing factor variables
Extensibility
- Ability to add new commands to Stata Updated
- Ado: scripting language
- Mata: C/C++ like compiled (byte-code) matrix
programming language
- Mata: object-oriented programming
- Open development environment: access to the same programming tools StataCorp developers use
- Access to source of many Stata commands and Mata functions
- Plugins (DLLs or shared objects)
- Java plugins—call Java libraries directly from Stata Updated
Dynamic document generation New
Creation of Word, Excel, and PDF files
- High-level creation of Word documents containing Stata results and graphs New
- Low-level programmatic access for fine-control creation of Word documents Updated
- High-level creation of PDF files containing Stata results and graphs New
- Low-level programmatic access for fine-control creation of PDF files Updated
- High level import/export of full Excel worksheets
- Low-level cell-by-cell access to write results to and read data
from Excel, including graphs, formulas, date formats, currency
formats, bold, italics, and more.
Additional resources
- Programming Reference Manual
- An Introduction to Stata Programming by Christopher F. Baum
- The Stata Blog: The programming category
- The Stata Blog: How to automate common tasks
- NetCourse 151: Introduction to Stata Programming
- NetCourse 152: Writing your Own Stata Commands
- Create Word documents: Starring putdocx
- Sharing your new comands with Stata users
See New in Stata 15 for more about what was added in Stata 15.
