st: filenames for -permute using-

[Roger Harbord <roger.harbord@bristol.ac.uk>]

Hi all (StataCorp programmers in particular!),

I just discovered that a program a wrote under version 7 of Stata has 
become slightly broken in Stata 9: -metareg- with the -permute(#, detail)- 
suboption no longer works.

Looking into this i find it now needs quotes around a temporary filename 
-line 299:

       permute `xlist1' `xlist2' using `pm', `level'

- must now be replaced by

       permute using `xlist1' `xlist2' using `"`pm'"', `level'

(pm is a local macro holding a the name of a tempfile)

A bit of tracing shows the problem occurs because under Windows the 
tempfile name contains a colon. This causes problems under Stata 9 because 
-permute- is now a prefix command and has a colon in its usual syntax, even 
though the -using- syntax doesn't have a colon.

I have a -version 7-  statement at the start of this program. [U] 11.6 
"File-naming conventions" says that quotes are required only for filenames 
containing blanks. I guess to be on the safe side I should always include 
quotes around tempfile names just in case someone's TEMP directory contains 
a space, but that seems unlikely (typically will be something like 
C:\WINNT\TEMP) and i've had no reports of problems before.

Would be very nice if this could be fixed by an official Stata update...

Best wishes,
Roger.

--
Roger Harbord            roger.harbord@bristol.ac.uk
MRC Health Services Research Collaboration
Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol
http://www.epi.bris.ac.uk

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