Sergiy
Just wanted you to know someone made it to the bottom.
You have explored the heart of an issue that has tripped up many a
Stata programmer and, in my case, I've been bitten too many times to
count. Working with, for want of a better expression, "safe"
situations (numerical variables, cleaned strings) one might never hit
situations like you have posed above. However, sometimes we input
strings from other data sources or through -file read- situations and
may snag an errant {`} or {"} only to find out later that Stata has
ingested a hairball. When compound double quotes don't work,
sometimes -macval(mymacro)- can save you but I don't believe there is
a bombproof method to handle all cases.
I am hoping that other folks will jump in here with examples of
situations where people have had troubles and solutions they may have
employed. I realize this slightly veers your original intent which
was to discuss how Stata parses lines, macro expressions, and the
error-messages (or lack thereof) associated with each of your special
cases.
For my own part, I would be very interested in the manner in which
programs are parsed. Somewhere in that process, for example, is the
reason why non-Mata program code is interpreted and not compiled - but
that is best left to another thread.
Steelers!
--
David Elliott
Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
-- Robert A. Heinlein (American science-fiction Writer, 1907-1988)
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