st: Dialog Programming

[Martin Weiss <martin.weiss@uni-tuebingen.de>]

Dear Statalisters,

an issue that I failed to bring up at the recent "wishes and grumbles"  
at the SNASUG meeting is the complexity of dialog programming. It  
seems to me that few authors of user-written software make the effort  
to write them. Exceptions are, for instance, -ssc d eclplot- and -ssc  
d psmatch2-. Usage of a command, particularly for new users, is  
facilitated by dialogs. In fact, Stata is proud of the availability of  
dialog boxes and a simultaneous command line and programming  
capability. Now, experienced users can master official Stata, apart  
from complicated graphs, from the command line. But the user-written  
software, which often covers functionality that you need only rarely  
(but then badly), comes largely without the benefit of a dialog box to  
guide users.

To provide a good example of the issue at hand, -ssc d tabout- is a  
wonderful command that I tend to use about once a week. This frequency  
is just about enough to maintain awareness of the command, but not  
enough to remember all the pitfalls, particularly the incompatibility  
between options. If I had a dialog box that took care of the interplay  
between options, that would make my life a lot easier. Is there any  
good place for authors to start their dialog programming effort (apart  
from http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/lang/db-intro/db1.html)? If  
not, why not? If so, why are they not rushing to use it?

Martin


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