st: re: Stata's ml sticks

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

<>
Nick said

I enjoy the odd game of knocking DOS but I think Kit is confusing two
distinct things here.

1. Lengths of global and local macro names.

2. Lengths of filenames. That clearly had implications for command names
defined by .ados.


Well, it may be that the change in the length of local and global  
macro names really was not a function of abandoning 8.3 filenames, but  
-help whatsnew6to7- says

   Long (32-character) names

    Stata now allows names to be up to 32 characters long.  That  
includes variable names, label names, macro names, and any other name
    you can think of.  This includes program names, and we have  
renamed a few existing Stata programs:


so the change in macro length came at the same time as the change in  
variable names and program names. Correlation is not causation, but  
the abandonment of DOS -- which enforced 8.3 filenames -- happened at  
the same time (Stata 7.0, 2000) as the change in macro name lengths.


Kit Baum, Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


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