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Re: st: RE: Using Mata within a foreach loop = r(1)


From   Pablo Mitnik <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: RE: Using Mata within a foreach loop = r(1)
Date   Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:10:07 -0600

Nick Cox wrote:
The answer to your 2 is Yes, with some exceptions for good reasons, as
when you call Stata from Mata, but that is not the issue as I understand it.
The issue is that at that point in your code you are back in Stata and
so (in context) -end- is illegal.
Why am I back in Stata at this point?


There can be no legal or meaningful -end- of a state without some
beginning
that defines the start of that state (cf. much philosophy and all
eschatology).
Less enigmatically, in Stata -end- on a line by itself can indicate the
end of a program which started with a -program- statement, and in Mata -end-
indicates
a desire to return to Stata. -help end- returns nothing, because -end-
is not a statement by itself. But -search end- brings up some pointers,
some of which are relevant to your 1.
It's a hard lesson that Stata's not behaving as you would guess, imagine
or prefer does not in itself constitute a bug.
Pablo Mitnik

Thanks much for the suggestion . I can do that, and will probably do it.
But:
1. Is there a documented "end" command in Stata? Typing "help end" returns nothing, while "search end" only returns the Mata end statement.
2. If I am "within Mata," shouldn't everything be run in Mata?

Maarten buis wrote:

--- Pablo Mitnik <[email protected]> wrote:

This is rather inconvenient when you have a longer code to run in Mata; and I haven't found any explanation in the manuals why the code

with "mata" and "end" shouldn't work -- my bet is that this is a bug.
The end command is run in Stata not Mata, so you get the correct error
message.

The way to do this in a more convenient way is to first create a mata
function, so within the loop all you need is a single call to Mata.
This is explained in terms of .ado programming in -help m1_ado-.
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--
Pablo A. Mitnik
University of Wisconsin-Madison (http://www.wisc.edu/ )
Department of Sociology ( http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/)
Center on Wisconsin Strategy (http://www.cows.org/ )
1180 Observatory Drive
Room 7114A
Madison, WI 53706
TEL (608) 2621839
E-mail: [email protected]

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* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/




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