Tom Palmer <[email protected]> ended a long posting with,
> Is Mata behaving incorrectly in code example 2 or is this my
> misunderstanding?
Mata is misbehaving in example 2. I have just listed the problem as a bug.
Where the bug lies, however, may not be where Tom expects.
Example 2 in Tom's posting was
: y = (7\1\6\5)
: p = order(y,1)
: y = y[p]
: y[p] = y
: y
y should return unchanged, but it doesn't. Tom starts with
(7\1\6\5) and ends up with (1\1\6\1). The line that caused
the problem was
: y[p] = y
Tom asked, "Is Mata (incorrectly?) processing subscripts on the left of an
assignment on an element by element basis"?
No. The LHS y[p] logic is fine. The problem is that y appeared on
the RHS of the assignment, too, and as Mata executed the y[p] from y,
the RHS changed as Mata filled in the left. As a demonstration,
substitute for the following
-----------------------------------------------
y[p] = y x = y
y[p] = x
-----------------------------------------------
The substitution will work, yet both should be equivalent.
We will fix Mata so that y[p]=y works.
-- Bill
[email protected]
*
* 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/
