Re: st: Naming convention, Ideas?

[Nick Winter <nw53@cornell.edu>]

Maybe something that works off the notion of "generalized."

One option would be to use the prefix approach, to create a syntax like:

  . genmanip : merge ...

  . genmanip : append ...

and so on.  Then you have only one .ado file to maintain, easily 
allowing options that apply to your command (distinct from the 
append, merge, etc. options), etc.

See -help _on_colon_parse- for a Stata command that helps parsing that syntax.

I'm not sure -genmanip- is a great name, but something like that?

--Nick Winter



At 10:10 AM 3/22/2006, you wrote:

> I am looking into writing a suite of wrapper data management 
> commands around merge, mmerge, append, joinby, and cross that can 
> either take a stata data file, gzip compressed data file or simply a 
> comma or tab delimited text file as the -using- argument, e.g. 
> <cmd_name> using *.dta | *.dta.gz | *.dgz | *.txt | *.cvs [, * ].
>
> Two questions:
> 1) Any ideas w/ regard to a consistent naming convention that could 
> be used? as I'd like to get it right the first time. I am not very 
> fond of using an integer as a suffix a la cf2, cf3 for various 
> reasons (e.g not very informative, unclear if integers imply 
> incremental functionality, can conflict with others' names).  So far 
> I thought of:
>
> - mmergeplus, appendplus, joinbyplus (but rather long)
> - aappend, jjoinby, (but look like typos, besides mmerge already exists)
>
> 2) Would anyone find these useful, i.e. should they be posted on SSC?
>
>
> Patrick Joly
>
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