Nick,
Quoting Nick Cox <[email protected]>:
> Mark Schaffer
>
> > Question 2:
> >
> > Shouldn't the {stata} smcl command be as clever about :s as
> > the {net}
> > smcl command? This would eliminate the need for messy little
> > auxiliary files in a command package.
> >
> > Comment:
> >
> > I don't think I would -preserve- the data etc., because I
> > would want
> > the user to be able to click on various examples
> > separately. Rather,
> > I would leave it to the user to voluntarily clear memory before
> > clicking on the line in the help display that loads the example
> > dataset. If Stata complains that it can't load the example data
>
> > because the existing data would be lost, that's fine by me.
>
> I went home for dinner. Fortunately, Vince answered
> the programming bit in the interim, but I can add a
> little arm-waving.
>
> This question is about programming style and etiquette.
> Often and often a program writer stops at a certain point
> for all sorts of reasons, and says, in effect, "My program
> does this. If you want a program to do something else,
> feel free to write it yourself!"
>
> Nevertheless, in practice, clickable examples have
> been introduced by Stata developers with a certain
> sales pitch, namely that you can try on the fly,
> and not disturb what you're doing. That's a precedent
> for user-programmers to match, it seems to me.
>
> Personally, I see a clickable example which
> requires a prior -clear- as a little user-unfriendly.
In this particular case I have a programming difficulty, as follows.
After the user types -help mycommand-, s/he faces a screen with a list of
of clickable examples, the first of which will load the data. After the
click, the data are loaded and the user is ready to click on one or more
other examples, as s/he choses.
The alternative is to put a preserve/load-example-data/restore-user-data
cycle into each clickable example. This seems to me to be likely to be
painfully slow, mostly because the data would have to be downloaded off
the net each time (the added loss of time via preserve and restore is
probably just icing on the cake). I haven't been able to check how Stata
developers handle this, but my guess is that the dataset that a clickable
example uses comes built-in with Stata and doesn't have to be downloaded
with each click. I don't see any way I can emulate this approach and at
the same time avoid the cost in speed, short of requiring users to
download the clickable example dataset at the same time that the rest of
the package is installed. Am I missing something?
--Mark
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