st: Critique on comment syntax and suggestions

["Mason, Bryce" <Bryce.Mason@lmu.edu>]

Listers,

Although not a question, thought this might be of interest as a "gotcha."

I was stymied by poor commenting practice but also by STATA's inflexible color coding of comments. Consider the following:

# delimit ;
* This next line won't get processed because I forgot to put a semicolon
drop if criticalvar=1;

Unfortunately, STATA's do-file editor inappropriately colors the line with the drop command as if it will be processed, even though the delimiter was not applied to the comment line. It would be great if the do-file editor knew that we were using a semicolon and made that whole section green until it encountered a semicolon, but I do not see this being easily implemented.

We will be moving our standard commenting practice to /* and */ in order to avoid this issue.

Hope it Helps,

Bryce


Bryce Mason, Ph.D.
Director of Institutional Research
Loyola Marymount University
1 LMU Drive, Suite 4820
Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659
e: bryce.mason@lmu.edu<mailto:bryce.mason@lmu.edu>
w: (310) 258-8838
f: (310) 338-1841




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