Here you want correctness of
syntax to depend on meaning, or guesses
at intent not content. My understanding
is that that's a slippery slope to programming
perdition.
The point about variable labels is indeed an
important detail.
Perhaps it's fixable deep, deep within -graph-. We
need a conVincing answer on that one from the
experts. However, consider that some
user-written graphics ados (some of mine,
any way) often set up default axis titles from
variable labels. Those variable labels are therefore
interpreted _before_ -graph- is called. If this
is a problem for user-written ados, it presumably
also is for _all_ graphical ados.
However, the problem works both ways. It must remain
perfectly legal to refer to global macros
when defining variable labels (or value labels).
Empirically my guess is that this is not
often done, but that's immaterial. It makes
perfect sense!
Nick
[email protected]
[email protected]
> I realise my earlier email was imprecise. I am mostly lamenting the
> mis-feature (IMO) that labels get evaluated as macros within
> the internals
> of -graph- even though they are not even macros to begin
> with. Nor are they
> passed as arguments by the user. Once a label is defined, it
> should always
> continue to be treated as a string literal, i.e. no macro
> interpolation
> should be done.
>
> The SMCL work-around works only in ytitle() or title()
> options, it doesn't
> work when setting variable labels, e.g.
>
> . la var xrus "{c $|}US per {c $|}CA"
>
> doesn't work the same way. It is not a serious nuisance but is still
> unfortunate; it doesn't reward the overhead of having
> diligently labelled
> one's data.
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