Re: st: RE: Critique on comment syntax and suggestions

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

I disagree that this falls under a syntax error. Stata now has color coding and when a comment is initiated it turns the comment green. That is the intent. Until the comment is ended, it should remain green, regardless of the delimiter expected (EOL, semicolon, */, or otherwise).

The do-file editor already scans the text continuously as evidenced by colors changing and code folding, so I do not think it would be much trouble for it to "know" the defined delimiter and act appropriately. Room for improvement.

Bryce


On Jan 28, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Steven Samuels wrote:

--


--


I've been bitten in the past by omitting semicolons. I now use
continuation characters, and reserve the semicolon to delimit single
commands, especially for graphs, that have many, often long, options.
I find such commands easier to read and modify if each option is on a
single line. If I use continuation characters in such commands, the
lines look messy unless I line the characters up. For me that's too
much work. As Nick said, it's personal taste.

Bryce, you are asking Stata's do-file editor to find syntax errors,
and I don't think that's its function.  After reading the second post
David referred to (it's by Joseph Coveney), I don't really see a bug.
Off topic, "Stata" is spelled "Stata." See the FAQ Section 8.2.

Steve

On Jan 28, 2011, at 12:51 PM, Nick Cox wrote:

Thanks for the reference.

On this point I think it mostly boils down to personal taste.

The history is simple: the original developers of Stata were highly
active and experienced C programmers before they ever invented Stata.
I suspect this detail was for their use when so inclined, and not just
for users outside the company. However, the publicly visible house
style of StataCorp is to use #delimit ; very sparingly. But that has
no implications for anyone else.

But if I follow Bryce correctly there is a small bug in the do-file
editor, which regardless of taste is an action point for StataCorp.

Nick

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 5:38 PM, David Radwin <dradwin@mprinc.com<mailto:dradwin@mprinc.com>>
wrote:
Bryce,

I was tripped up by the interaction of semicolon delimiters and
comments
recently, too, as were others in the past, before the built-in
editor had
syntax highlighting:

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-11/msg01338.html
http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-09/msg01271.html

But there is another solution: don't use semicolon delimiters, even
if you
are accustomed to using them in other software.

Nick Cox makes this point in "Suggestions on Stata programming style"
(Stata Journal 2005, vol 5, Number 4, pp. 560-566).
http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.html?articlenum=pr0018

Mason, Bryce

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.
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Bryce Mason, Ph.D.
Director of Institutional Research
Loyola Marymount University
1 LMU Drive, Suite 4820
Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659
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