st: Re: Stata 12: wish list

[nshephard <nshephard@gmail.com>]

Thomas Speidel wrote:
> 
> One common response I hear is that solutions exists in the form of  
> user written programs.  There is a large number of great work (Ian  
> Watson, John Gallup, Michael Lokshin, Ben Jann, Roger Newson to name a  
> few authors).  But these tend to be ad-hoc solutions:  some only  
> handle a certain type of data, some will display p-values but no  
> confidence intervals, etc etc. This in my view has the side effect of  
> forcing the user to either write his or her program, or produce the  
> tables from scratch in Excel/OpenOffice/Latex.
> 

The problem with this though is that there is no way of anticipating what an
individual will think is most appropriate.  Personally I'd plump for LaTeX,
but I'm sure others wouldn't.  There will always be something that one
person uses that isn't supported and "should be".

The user-written commands are very flexible and exceptionally useful and I'm
very grateful to the various authors for developing them in the first
instance, sharing them and continuing to develop them.

Having to write your own program to produce the desired table is not a bad
thing, and after you've done it once you'll find you can re-use your code. 
It may even evolve into a ado-file that you can then share with the rest of
the world.

This is a good thing to my mind.

Personally I would rather see Stata development focus on statistical issues
than presentation issues as they are far more common to all users.


Thomas Speidel wrote:
> 
> Making more estimates available after estimation and more results  
> stored in locals in general could perhaps be a good starting point.   
> 

Most commands leave behind a lot of results in scalars and matrices that can
be utilised afterwards.  See -man return- for full details.  I rarely find
there is anything lacking from these.

Neil

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