st: Mata and nested loops

[David Harless <dwharles@vcu.edu>]

In answering a question on assigning rows of a matrix using -for- 
(http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2005-11/msg01018.html),
Ben Jann gave an example

mata
A = (1,2,3\4,5,6)
C = J(2,3,.)
for (i=1; i<=2; i++) {
	C[i,.] = A[i,.]
	C[i,.]   // display
}
end

I tried to make a simple modification to this so that each element in the matrix 
was assigned in nested -for- loops rather than assigning a row at a time.

mata
A = (1,2,3\4,5,6)
C = J(2,3,.)
for (i=1; i<=2; i++) {
	for (j=1, j<=3, j++) {
  		C[i,j] = A[i,j]
	}
}
C
end


But this generates the error:
unexpected end of line
--------------------------------------------
r(3000);

end of do-file
r(3000);


The nested loop works fine in other simple examples such as

mata
C = J(2,3,.)
for (i = 1; i<=rows(C);i++) {
	for (j = 1; j<=cols(C);j++) {
		C[i,j] = i+j
	}
}
C
end

But not when I make the element by element assignment C[i,j] = A[i,j] above.

Thanks for your consideration,
Dave Harless


*
*   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/