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RE: st: RE: egen & sum()
At 05:29 AM 11/26/2008, Nick Cox wrote:
Although it's StataCorp call, there is no obvious reason why any of the
old names should ever stop working. The most obvious reason for change
is that StataCorp might want to reclaim some of them, but as said they
are now considered objectionable.
I don't know about these particular functions, but Statacorp's policy
in the past has been that names can stop working once you get to the
next version, e.g. if a name was changed in Stata 9 the old name will
continue to work in Stata 9, but once you get to Stata 10 it is only
guaranteed to work under version control. Personally, I would prefer
that old names continue to work even without version control for all
eternity. The now undocumented -index- function was brought back to
life when several baffled and bewildered people who couldn't figure
out what the new name was requested it.
It probably is better to break down and learn and use the new names,
since anyone else who is reading your code will be baffled and
bewildered by your use of functions that are no longer documented.
Given that, thanks to version control, very few commands ever die
completely, I continue to wish that there was some easy way to get
help for all these things that now go undocumented.
-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME: (574)289-5227
EMAIL: [email protected]
WWW: http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
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