The old -menu- was an idiosyncratic menu within Stata for DOS. (I can't
speak offhand on whether it was supported within Unix or Mac versions.)
As I recall it predated MS Windows and had very little in common with
what MS Windows users would now regard as standard. That has itself of
course evolved over the years.
It's worth recalling that MS Windows was not taken seriously even by
many PC users until about Windows 3.1. (Not even now, some others will
be saying, but I'll not get into that.) Also, other windowed interfaces
with DOS existed and were at least in some cases much better than MS
Windows.
Between this -menu- in Stata (1.2 on) and the present dialog system
(introduced in Stata 8) there was another dialog system.
I'll puff that the special issue of the Stata Journal 5(1) 2005 with
historical bits and pieces is accessible to all from
http://www.stata-journal.com/sj5-1.html
Also, the Stata 1.0 manual is accessible from the UCLA site.
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sca/Stata1/default.htm
Nick
[email protected]
Sergiy Radyakin
Seems like old syntax was not bad at all.
How about the -menu- command mentioned earlier?
Is it "window menu ...." now? or is it "wmenu"?
. which menu
command menu not found as either built-in or ado-file
r(111);
. which wmenu
built-in command: wmenu
(there is no help for wmenu)
On 8/14/08, William Gould, StataCorp LP <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
