Giovanni Vecchi <[email protected]> asked whether -verinst-
is still a valid Stata command:
> with the advent of Stata 10, the commands <about> and <verinst>
> produce the same output. Exactly the same. This does not make sense to
> me.
>
> While <about> is still documented in the reference manual, <verisnt>
> is not. Nor is there an entry for <verinst> in the on-line help.
>
> I'm tempted to conclude that <verinst> has become an out-of-date
> command. Can anyone confirm it?
>
> I'm running Stata/MP, duly updated.
-verinst- is no longer an officially-documented command in Stata 10.
Many years ago, on old DOS computers, people would sometimes install
Stata in such a way that Stata could not find its ado-files. We
created a simple command implemented as an ado-file named -verinst-
which people could try to execute to see if Stata could find their
ado-files.
If Stata could find -verinst- and execute it, obviously Stata could
find its ado-files. If the command was not found, it meant Stata
could not find its ado-files and troubleshooting was necessary.
In modern versions of Stata, the installation routines install
Stata in such a way that we no longer hear about Stata not being
able to find its official ado-files. Thus, we deemed -verinst- to
no longer be necessary and made it undocumented. We left around
a simple ado-file for -verinst- so that we wouldn't break anything
in case any users had a call to -verinst- in a do-file.
--Alan
([email protected])
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