Hi,
it appears that the * comment indicator, which may be used at
the beginning of a line to indicate that the line is to be
ignored (see -help comments-), cannot be used with Mata.
Example:
: void somefunction()
> {
> * display("some text")
> }
: somefunction()
some text
somefunction(): 3257 nonpointer found where pointer
required
<istmt>: - function returned error
(0 lines skipped)
The error also occurs if somefunction() is defined whithin an
ado file. Other comment indicators like // or /**/ work fine.
If one really thinks hard about how the different comment
indicators are handeled in Stata, it is not surprising that
the * comment indicator does not work in Mata. Nonetheless,
I think that this is bad news for people being accustomed to
using the * comment indicator.
Even more bad news is that the problem is not mentionned in the
documentation (at least not in places where one would look for it
such as -help comment-, [M-1] first, [M-1] ado, [U] 16.1.2, or
[U] 18.11.2). I hope that this will change in a future update.
grumble...
ben
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
