German Rodriguez <[email protected]> has discovered a somewhat embarassing,
yet technically interesting bug (for us at least) in Mata:
> Be careful not to type mata" when you mean mata: (the keys are next to each
> other), as this appears to crash Stata and you may lose your work.
The first time you launch Mata within Stata, the Mata compiler first scans for
a token (a word, quoted string, special characeter, etc.) before it
initializes itself. Presumably you can always successfully scan for such a
token, but German reproduced the one situation when this fails, namely a
dangling open quote. Since scanning for the token failed before the compiler
initialized itself, Mata and Stata crashed.
This bug occurs only if the very first thing you type in Mata is an unclosed
quoted string, thus up until now it has gone undiscovered. In any case, we
have fixed the bug and the fix will be available in the next executable
update.
--Bobby --Bill
[email protected] [email protected]
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