Nick -
I think -syntax anything- may actually achieve what I want inside an .ado
file as you suggest. I was not aware of the "anything" argument. It
apparently is not in the manual (at least I can't find it) - but it does
appear in the -help-. I see a whole new vista of possibilities now that I
know about this trick. Thanks for the suggestion.
Al Feiveson
syntax anything is indeed very useful (and let us do some things we could
not do otherwise) but has a side effect, since (like -file- or -ssc-) it is
not part of virgin Stata 7. Its use in original Stata 7 (which appears to
be that installed on many people's machines, due to their inability to
figure out how to get those pesky three letters to show up in WinExplorer)
causes your routine to fail with 'syntax error' (as opposed to 'no such
command', as a call to file or ssc will trigger). We have had dozens of
trouble reports on this routine caused by this problem; the problem is
readily fixed by 'update executable', but that seems to be problematic in
itself for some.
