Re: st: Difference btw "clear" & "drop _all"

[David Kantor <dkantor@jhu.edu>]

At 04:14 PM 3/19/2004 -0500, Nomorenook wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am a newbie to STATA and I have a question regarding "clear" and "drop 
> _all".
>
> According to STATA, these two are supposed to be the same. However, if I 
> use "clear", even my matrices are deleted from the memory, as opposed to 
> "drop _all", which just deletes the variables but maintains matrices in 
> the memory. Can anyone tell me more about the differences between these 
> two commands?
These command are not the same, as you have discovered.

-drop _all- drops your observations and you variables; that's all.

-clear- does -drop _all- and a whole lot more.  For a complete list of what 
it does, see -help clear-.

You can also look at the ado file.  On a windows system, using Stata8, that 
would typically be
 c:\stata8\ado\base\c\clear.ado

Or, you can...
 set trace on
 clear
to see all that happens (be sure you are ready to clear when you do that).

Good luck.
-- David

David Kantor
Institute for Policy Studies
Johns Hopkins University
dkantor@jhu.edu
410-516-5404

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