Friedrich Huebler ([email protected]) reports a problem with
aorder:
> When I type -aorder- I get an error message.
>
> system limit exceeded - see manual
> r(1000);
This is an issue with -aorder- in both Stata 8.2 and 9.0. It
can arise sometimes, but not always, if there are multiple
variables in the dataset that contain the letters "c", "d",
"e", and "f" next to each other.
This will be fixed in an upcoming ado-file update.
The background on this bug is as follows:
-aorder- needs to pull out numbers in the middle of variable
names as part of its sorting process. In Stata 8, -aorder-
could have problems with variable names that contained a number
followed by "d" or "e" followed by another number. To -aorder-,
that whole string looked like a number in scientific notation.
A fix was made to -aorder- to resolve this problem between Stata 8
and Stata 8.1. That fix was done by changing "d" to "c" and "e" to "f",
doing what -aorder- then needed to do, and then changing the letters
back again. After that change, certain combinations of these
four letters next to each other in variable names could trigger
an infinite recursion in -aorder-, causing the error message
Friedrich experienced.
-aorder- has now been modified to recognize substrings of variable
names that could be misinterpreted as numbers in scientific
notation so that this problem will not arise in the future. The
revised -aorder- will be available in a future ado-file update.
--Alan
([email protected])
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