Re: st: RE: Follow up on matrix building question -- correct version

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 06:24 PM 4/29/2005 +0100, Nick Cox wrote:
> Any ambitious Stata programming project
> depends on careful study of much of the
> User's Guide and the Programming manual.
> Hamilton's excellent book does no more
> than give a taste of what is involved.
I agree with Nick.  Also, if you are using the -ml- command, I found 
Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Stata (available from Stata Press) to be 
extremely helpful.  I don't know if its advice becomes outdated with Stata 
9 or not.

I also find it extremely helpful to plagiarize from existing Stata 
programs, at least if you want to make the program usable by others.  So 
much of programming consists of error checking or adding helpful 
options.  I wanted to add -predict- support for my program so I adapted 
Stata's -mlogit_p- program for this purpose.  (I do give attribution when I 
do things like that!)  I assume Stata has no qualms with people doing such 
things with its programs (that is why there are so many user-written 
programs that end with a "2"), but if you wanted to copy heavily from 
another user-written program you probably want to ask permission 
first.  The programs might have very different goals but yet share things 
in common when it comes to parsing syntax, error checking and providing 
options.


-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
FAX:    (574)288-4373
HOME:   (574)289-5227
EMAIL:  Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.Edu
WWW (personal):    http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
WWW (department):    http://www.nd.edu/~soc

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/