Bill,
It's nice to get a generous official response after a purely speculative
query. Thanks ever so much. I'll certainly remember to execute -help
whatsnew- from now on to keep track of future developments.
On the point about commerical secrecy, I think I would count myself among
the vast majority of Statalisters (if I'm allowed to use that sobriquet)
who are happy to wait until the next version comes out to see what new
goodies are in store for us. Stata 8 is already complex (in a good way)
and sophisticated enough for me to be kept occupied with its machinations
for quite some time. By the time I've mastered it, the list have no doubt
have moved onto 10 or 11.
C.
William Gould wrote:
> Okay, we will announce Stata new subreleases on Statalist.
>
> As I said at the user meetings in London and Berlin last year, rather than
> holding back all new developments until the big new release, we are
> adoptiong
> a policy of releasing some new features as we go, for free and so, I said,
> users will see Stata 8.1, 8.2, etc., among the updates.
>
> It is, as a practical matter, difficult for us to hold back new code and
> then
> release it all on one date. Moreover, as a release got older, we at
> StataCorp
> become more disconnected from our users, because the Stata we were working
> with was so different from that which users had. We were seeing cases
> where
> unknowing users were spending time implementing features which we had
> already
> implemented, and yet we were sworn to secrecy.
>
> I hasten to add: Just because an update has a new subrelease number, that
> does not necessarily imply that it is a "bigger" update than an update
> with
> the same subrelease number. We change subrelease numbers to handle
> incompatibilities. In Stata 8.2, something changed, for the better, but
> with
> the side effect that Stata would do something different given the same
> input
> from the user. To prevent that imporovement from causing problems with
> do-files and ado-files that users have written, the version number
> changed.
> Programs and do-files that said -version 8.1- or -version 8- at the top
> will
> continue to work as anticipated.
>
> Now the fact is, that when the version number changes, something neater
> probably has been introduced or changed than when the version number does
> not
> change. That is because, neat things tend to cause syntax problems. It
> is
> nontheless possible that we could add a new feature to Stata -- a really
> big
> new feature -- but that inclusion of the new feature has no side effects
> whatsoever. In that case, we would not change the subversion number.
>
> All of which is to say, you really do need to read -help whatsnew-.
>
> -- Bill
> [email protected]
> *
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> * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
CLIVE NICHOLAS |t: 0(44)191 222 5969
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*
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