st: Is this peculiar, or is it me?

[Philip Greenwood <philip.greenwood@mcri.edu.au>]

I entered some code into Stata and the output was not as I expected. I've pasted the log below. Note there is no dataset loaded into memory.


. do "oddcode"

. foreach item in thing1 thing2 {
  2.     di "item: `item'"
  3.     local foo "a_great_big_fish"
  4.     foreach var of varlist _all {
  5.         di "variable: `var'"
  6.     }
  7. }
item: thing1
variable: a_great_big_fish
item: thing2
variable: a_great_big_fish

.
end of do-file

While it's questionable at best to enter the -foreach var of varlist _all- with no data loaded, I would not have expected the macro `var' to evaluate to the contents of `foo'. Can anyone tell me what is going on here?





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