Not quite so. To expand a remark made earlier in the thread,
Stata indulges trailing spaces within references to macro
names, in at least some circumstances.
So, for example,
. local j = 1
. di `j '
will work as if the space didn't exist. There might
be a temptation to regard this as a feature. My
own guess is that it is just a side-effect of
the way the Stata parsing engine is indifferent
to spaces in some circumstances. In this case, Stata's
seen an opening left quote and a legal macro name and it's
on the look-out for the only legal successor, a closing
right quote. Although the above works, users should still
regard `j ' as affected by a typo and try to edit out such
spaces, not least because this behaviour shouldn't be regarded
as guaranteed in future releases of Stata.
Note that this presupposes that a macro has been previously
defined. Like Stas, I don't know a way to define a macro
with a space as part of its name and that should be
impossible as well as illegal.
Nick
[email protected]
Stas Kolenikov
>
> Is there a type in your -while- command? `j ' would give you an empty
> string. I am not even aware of ways to define a local macro that has a
> space in its name. So it is the -while- way that should not
> work, at least
> exactly the way you wrote it.
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