There is a much simpler upstream solution,
reading the manual at [U] 21.3.1 and
appreciating that the two quote characters
differ.
In principle, I too would like syntax colouring
in -doedit-. In practice, the issue is much more complicated.
Arguably, the roles of -doedit- are (a) to be a
minimal text editor in case users need it
and (b) to work smoothly with the rest of Stata.
I'd maintain that (b) is even more important than
(a). On every platform Stata supports there
are "free" editors either bundled with the OS
or downloadable for nothing, which users often
prefer, or at least are familiar with, but there
isn't a guarantee that those editors will e.g.
have facilities to run Stata code. That's
certainly true of Notepad, the only editor
available automatically under Windows. (Wordpad
is better described as a minimal word processor,
I think.)
Looking at -doedit- it is easy to agree that
it is not especially feature-rich, but it does not
claim to be -- just as -edit- does not claim
to be a spreadsheet.
More practically, I gather from comments at
user meetings that programming syntax colouring would
be a much bigger project than might be guessed;
possibly some of the code would need to be
platform-dependent, thus complicating the task.
If it were trivial, there would certainly be a good case
for saying it should be added.
So this boils down to the usual question of
priorities: even if StataCorp agreed, this would
push other projects into the future, and there
are many other things I would rather see first,
such as an integrated graph editor.
Nick
[email protected]
Ron�n Conroy
> > Be certain you are using the LEFT single quote as the
> leading character
> > delimiting the local macro name. That is to say:
> >
> > ... date`i' should work. Fonts don't always translate
> well on plain text
> > email, so let me spell it out, as it were:
>
> This is where a text editor that understands Stata syntax is
> invaluable.
> Correctly quoted text will be coloured, but not incorrectly
> quoted text.
>
> I do think that syntax colouring should be high on the list
> of improvements
> to be considered for Stata 9.
>
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