I'm one of those people who feels that Stata in its current version has come
very close to perfect! My concern is that with too many "improvements" it
will migrate to the land of bloatware. I prefer to see Stata stay lean and
mean. In particular, I would hate to see it start to look like SPSS, a
package I fled many years ago.
I do have one tiny wish for change, though. I often want to re-examine the
output of a run, and I launch Stata by double-clicking the icon of the smcl
file it produced. Problem is, the *same* icon is also used for do-files (at
least in the Windows version). It is easy to hit the do-file by mistake,
causing the analysis to be re-run. If the analysis is quick, and if the data
files it uses have not changed since the original run, this is a trivial
problem. But in the opposite circumstance, I then have to abort the run, drag
out my backups and restore the smcl-file, which has been clobbered by the -log
using foo, replace- command in the do file. If the do-file also modifies any
of the data sets, then these too must be restored from backups.
All that is needed to avoid this is a distinct icon for smcl-files. There are
distinct icons for .dta and .gph files, so it can't be hard to do.
Pax vobiscum.
Clyde Schechter
Dept. of Family & Social Medicine
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, NY, USA
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