maintanance files will help when compiling a list of built-in and
supplied-with commands.
look e.g. at ...\Stata10\ado\base\c\cmddlg.maint
and in general at *.maint
IMHO the lists should be separated into language constructs (program,
end, while, if, etc), built-in commands (basic bricks), and everything
else (ado). I guess the students wanted to know what tools are at
hand, available for work, in an attempt to reduce the open-end
question "which command to use?" to a multiple choice question "which
of these to use?".
-which- and -findfile- are not useful for the purpose. because in
order to check whether the command exists or not you must have an idea
of what it may be called. I've seen a few people who would _suspect_
existence of xtivreg2. (in other words this is precisely the case
where in order to ask a question, you need to know the answer).
About 5 years ago I've seen in library a 3-volume encyclopedia (I
guess about 5000pages in total) of all software released in a
particular year (e.g. in 1990, don't remember now). Although an
immense effort was done to sort and describe all those programs, it
was surely neither complete nor accurate.
However, I see a very practical need for such a list of Stata
commands: for the purpose of syntax highlighting. It would
significantly improve the readability of the programs, because current
highlighters AFAIK are based on Stata's 6-7 syntax (at least mine is).
It may also help preventing name collisions.
Regards, Sergiy Radyakin
On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
-findit- does not guarantee to find everything in the public domain. For
example, -findit- will not find programs published informally within
Statalist postings, such as yours this week.
Nick
[email protected]
Martin Weiss
Agreed! Would a combination of -findfile-, -which- and -findit- be
sufficient?
Nick Cox
-which- tells whether a command is visible to Stata given your Stata
installation and your current working directory. That is only a subset
of existence "as we know it, Jim".
Martin Weiss
An alphabetical list is pointless. If it is all about the mere existence
of
a command, -which- is the way to go...
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