But in the case of -save myfile, old- Stata 8 does NOT produce the
same result as Stata 7, even if -version 7.0- is at the top of the
ado file.
Perhaps the real issue here is that the 'old' option is misnamed: it really
should be named 'savedown' or 'lastversion'. In both Stata 7 and Stata 8
the old option operates consistently: it produces a dataset in the format
of the prior version of the program. In that sense telling Stata 8 to work
like Stata 7 makes no difference. Stata could operate like MS Word and save
down to several different past versions, but it doesn't. All too often
features like that bite you eventually (I have a colleague with piles of
Word 4 files...)
