It's easy:
A bug to a user is when the program doesn't do what the user wants. In a
large fraction of cases, this implies that the code possesses
extrasensory perceptive ability to discern the user's intent.
A bug to a developer is when the program doesn't do what the developer
thinks is reasonable. Even in that case, official Stata programs
typically carry minimal internal documentation on who did what and when,
so that it is to be presumed that the bug was introduced by someone
else, who has now left the company.
Nick
[email protected]
Martin Weiss
" There is a little bit of inside knowledge here, itself learnable from
. viewsource egen.ado
that a call to -egen- with a call to function -foobar- fires up
_gfoobar.ado."
I obtained the same insight from -trace-ing the execution of the code I
gave
in my reply.
The semantics of a "bug" are of course debatable. What always make me
nervous is when I do not find a perceived "bug" in the archives although
inspection of the underlying code reveals it must have been around for a
considerable amount of time...
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