Stata at the lowest level reads in everything it receives
from anywhere, the user plus -- commands,
data, whatever -- byte by byte.
The Stata that we mortals interact with interprets our
commands, fine except for this one small fraction
(who knows? 0.001%?) of Stata usage.
The point I was making is that it is mathematically impossible to devise a
pair of quote strings to go around arbitrary strings (because arbitrary
strings may include an unmated right quote string). Statistically, a pair
of quotes may go around most of the strings encountered, most of the time.
However, if Stata is going to use use macros routinely to store arbitrary
strings (as in the -file- command), then there should be some way of
accessing their contents which does not require quote strings.
