st: bug in bs4rw (or bug in Stata?)

[Keith Dear <keithdear4@gmail.com>]

-bs4rw- bootstraps a command which may be user-defined. It seems the
command MUST have options, or at least a syntax statement ending in ",
*". This seems undesirable.

The following code snippet from bs4rw.ado shows that `cmdname' is
called with a comma even if `cmdopts' and `rest' are empty.
If `cmdname' in fact has no options, this causes bs4rw to crash with
the error message "options not allowed".
.       capture noisily quietly `noisily' `version'     ///
.                `cmdname' `cmdargs'                     ///
.                `wgt' if `touse', `cmdopts' `rest'
(This is in the code section "bs4rw: First call to `cmdname' with data
as is" : later on the issue is handled more carefully.)



But anyway, it seems to me that this should not be a problem, and the
bug is really in the Stata language, not in bs4rw after all. Consider
this:

. prog snip
.    syntax
. end
. snip     // no effect of course, but no problems either
. snip ,   // the comma triggers the "options not allowed" error even
though no options have been given.

Should this be an error? I don't think so.
Keith


-- 
Dr Keith Dear
National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health
ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia
CRICOS provider #00120C
Phone +61 (02) 6273 2208
Mobile 0424 450 396
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