My experience is that Stata Corp really tries to make Stata as
similar as possible across platforms but at the same time they want
to use the best features of each platform. Of corse, other
considerations must matter too, like support issues. FWIW, I used
Stata 4-6 for the Mac, Stata 7 for Windows, and I will use Stata 8
for Linux.
In the case of the Mac do file-editor, or perhaps more general, I
like this quote from the post by Chinh Nguyen, Director of Macintosh
Development, on December 21st (message 36591 in Yahoo):
> When a problem such as this arises, we must decide whether what
> we're adding is of great enough benefit to most of our users even
> though it means a higher OS requirement.
It's a very good post, I think, and it deserves to be read as a
whole.
In the case of ODBC, Stata Tech Support told me that there was a
problem with lack of driver support for Mac and Unix/Linux which
they hope to resolve in the form of a free update in the future. But
they do not have an official time frame for that.
If you don't feel strongly about a particular platform-specific
feature, my advise is to pick the platform you like the most, and
then get Stata 8 for that platform.
I hope this helps.
Anders Alexandersson
[email protected]
David Airey <david.airey@V...> wrote:
> Stata is one of the few applications that runs on several
> operating systems. In reading over the literature on Stata
> 8 and some comments here, I noticed only Windows gets ODBC
> support, and only the Mac gets a do-file editor that
> supports multiple windows. Is it intended that things even
> out between platforms when the platform itself is not the
> obstacle?
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