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RE: st: Royston's mvis ado and version questions


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: Royston's mvis ado and version questions
Date   Thu, 30 Sep 2004 15:49:50 +0100

Nick's first statement is very good 
advice, but his last statement is
misleading. 

No; this is not really what -version- does. 
There are lots of counter-examples. 

For example, the way that -set trace- works 
has been changed in Stata 8. As far as I can 
tell, no amount of version control will 
bring back the old behaviour. 

As another example, setting -version- does not 
restore bugs in a previous version. Good news
normally, but bad news if what Stata deemed a bug 
was a feature for the programmer whose program 
you are using. 

The best statement of what -version- does is, 
surprise, the details in the help for -version-. 
The key is more that old behaviour can be arranged
if it was thought that someone might seriously 
miss it, but there's a bundle of judgement calls
there. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

Nick Winter
 
> Note also, if you are trying to rewrite a program for an 
> earlier version of 
> Stata, it is crucial to run the program in the earlier version of 
> Stata.  That is, if you change the version statement on a program to 
> "version 7", and then run it successfully in Stata 8, that is 
> no guarantee that it will not crash when run by Stata 7.
> 
> Stata 8 still allows some new features even when version is 
> set to 7 (or 
> less).  All the version statement ensures is that any 
> behavior that changed 
> from 7 to 8 will operate as it used to.

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