David Kantor <[email protected]> asked,
> Speaking of the history of Stata, does anyone know what the reserved
> word -with- is/was for? It is a reserved word, but as far as I know,
> there is no command that uses it. Or am I wrong about that? Was it
> ever used? For what? If not, what was the intent?
In a very early version of Stata, even before the release of Stata 1.0
in January of 1985, the syntax of the -replace- command was
replace <varname> with <#> [in] [if]
The "with <#>" part was replaced with "= <exp>" once we realized we
could merge the code for -replace- and -generate-.
The early syntax of Stata was based on a combination of Wylbur, CMS,
Unix, and C. -replace- (and -in-'s #, #/#, and #/l syntax) came from
Wylbur. Return codes -- and the r(); notation -- came from CMS, as
did the recently mentioned (and long dead) -spool- command. -spool-
became -log-. The idea behind -log- came from CMS. The rest is pretty
obviously Unix and C.
