st: Programs for text processing: a chronology

[Christopher Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

<>
In re various claims about user-written text processing programs for  
use with Stata, I would like to present the following facts, in  
chronological order:

(1) -outreg-, by John Luke Gallup, was written for version 6 of Stata.  
It was first hosted on the SSC Archive, which I maintain, on 10 Apr  
1999. (RePEc templates, unlike package descriptions, contain both  
creation dates and revision dates). -outreg- was presented in Stata  
Technical Bulletin 46 (Nov 1998), with revisions in STB 49 (May 1999),  
STB 58 (Nov 2000) and STB 59 (Jan 2001). The latest version available  
from SSC is 3.1.8, revised as of 3 May 2008. Given that, I believe  
that John Gallup would disagree with the statement that appears in - 
findit outreg- listings for the STB that "The original outreg command  
is no longer maintained. It has been replaced by outreg2."

-outreg-, being written for Stata 6.0, relies on retrieving  
information from the ereturn list directly after an estimation command  
is executed.

(2) The -estimates- suite of commands was added to Stata in version 8  
of 2003, permitting a user program to access several sets of estimates  
from earlier estimation commands.

(3) -estout-, by Ben Jann, was written for version 8.0 of Stata (it  
now requires Stata 8.2). It was first hosted on the SSC Archive on 22  
July 2004. It was subsequently described in Stata Journal 5:3 (Q3  
2005) and SJ 7:2 (Q2 2007).

-estout- is based on the technology introduced in Stata 8.0: the  
stored -estimates-. One must use -estimates store- or its own  
convenience command -eststo- to place stored results where they can be  
accessed by -estout-. Thus, although the end result is similar to that  
of -outreg-, the logic is quite different, as -estout- is only invoked  
after all estimation commands to be tabulated in one table have been  
executed and their results stored.

(4) -outreg2-, by Roy Wada, was written for version 7 of Stata, and  
first hosted on the SSC Archive on 19 October 2005. It has not been  
documented in the STB or SJ. It is documented as being based to some  
degree on an uncirculated version 4.0 of -outreg- provided to me by  
John Gallup. As -outreg2- was written for Stata 7, which did not  
support stored -estimates-, it originally relied on the same  
technology as -outreg-: retrieval of results from the ereturn list  
following an estimation command. It has since been enhanced to work  
with stored -estimates-, introduced in Stata version 8. -outreg2-  
provides additional functionality to users of Stata 8.0, 8.2, and  
11.0, as described in its help file.

Although this chronology does not (and is not meant to) decisively  
confirm or reject any claims of offenses against intellectual property  
rights, I think it is useful to note the order in which these highly  
popular alternative packages for text processing in Stata were  
originally developed and made available to the Stata user community.

Kit Baum
maintainer, SSC Archive
Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
http://repec.org



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