> > 1. Stata made full variable names available for the output of all
> > procedures.
> You reckon that 32-character names are consistent with the other output
> of all procedures? That is, there is enough real estate in
> terms of monitor size and printer paper to show
> all that is reasonably wanted without SPSS-like tree consumption?
Hey, Nick, don't you remember how nice it was with Stata 5 that only
allowed 8 characters for variable names?..
> > 3. Stata used the same single = sign for both assignment and logical
> > statements.
> On the contrary, it is mathematics that is wrong here!
The different = and == are coming from C programming language, and
they are a good programming style. Somewhat more of the low level
thing than the color schemes you mention below.
> > 4. Stata offered more flexible table output. My journals want
> > coefficients, stars for significance level, and standard errors in
> > parentheses under the coefficients. It would be nice to have a simple
> > way to do this. Allowing users to set up a template might be helpful.
> This has been a long-term issue. My wild guess is that this will happen
> around Stata 11 or 12!
And it's been around for at least five years -- see -outreg-, -estout-
and all that stuff. As long as there are users' workarounds, Stata
Corp does not have to bother on its own.
> > 5. Color codes in editors are nice even for experienced users. For
> > example, in SAS some errors jump out because the colors go wrong -- a
> > forgotten end of comment makes everything below a comment color, etc.
> There's just been a thread on this. You should read the postings.
I don't think Stata Corp. is going to concentrate on making -doedit-
nicer... rather do statistics! And the end users can go with any of a
few dozen good text editors (Word is not a text editor, and neither is
NotePad). It is in the FAQ, too.
--
Stas Kolenikov
http://stas.kolenikov.name
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