Nick's first statement is very good
advice, but his last statement is
misleading.
No; this is not really what -version- does.
There are lots of counter-examples.
For example, the way that -set trace- works
has been changed in Stata 8. As far as I can
tell, no amount of version control will
bring back the old behaviour.
As another example, setting -version- does not
restore bugs in a previous version. Good news
normally, but bad news if what Stata deemed a bug
was a feature for the programmer whose program
you are using.
The best statement of what -version- does is,
surprise, the details in the help for -version-.
The key is more that old behaviour can be arranged
if it was thought that someone might seriously
miss it, but there's a bundle of judgement calls
there.
Nick
[email protected]
Nick Winter
> Note also, if you are trying to rewrite a program for an
> earlier version of
> Stata, it is crucial to run the program in the earlier version of
> Stata. That is, if you change the version statement on a program to
> "version 7", and then run it successfully in Stata 8, that is
> no guarantee that it will not crash when run by Stata 7.
>
> Stata 8 still allows some new features even when version is
> set to 7 (or
> less). All the version statement ensures is that any
> behavior that changed
> from 7 to 8 will operate as it used to.
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