Patrick Joly
>
> Until now, I had no idea -cmdname- existed despite having
> contributed a
> number of files to SSC. Ignorance is no excuse, however,
> the lack of uptake
> w.r.t -cmdname- is not surprising given how little publicity it got
> recently: a search of all 35,000 messages on the Statalist
> archive doesn't
> turn up any references to -cmdname-. The fact that -findit
> cmdname- points
> to an insert in STB-51 is moot since you have to know the
> command exists
> before even thinking of running the search.
Not quite. For example,
. findit command name
and (even better)
. findit registration
would have worked. Of course, this is an old
problem with many variants, and sometimes
only if you know the answer can you
formulate the optimum question:
"Your spelling is appalling. Make sure
you look up words you don't know
in the dictionary!"
"But if I don't how to spell the
word, how do I find it in the dictionary?"
In the case of -findit-, the problem is clearly
identifying the keywords which specify
what you want without too many false positives
or false negatives.
But there is one thing users can do, if
they find out about something indirectly,
at least as far as what is in official
Stata or STB/SJ is concerned.
Once you found something with difficulty,
you can rummage around in the stata*.key
files and see what the keywords are
for that topic. These files are
in the s subdirectory off what -sysdir-
calls UPDATES, and they are pure text files,
so a good text editor will have no problem.
Having said, the advice is not to _change_
these files yourself, if only because
next update they may be overwritten
anyway, but to suggest to Stata Corp
keywords to be added.
Nick
[email protected]
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
