st: RE: Stata commands : multiple commands in one text line is allowed

[Pradipto Banerjee <pradipto.banerjee@adainvestments.com>]

Allan,

My use for the semicolon delimiter is that long Stata codes can be hard to read when one is trying to understand "logical" blocks in a code. E.g. consider the snippet:

. merge var1 var2 using data1
. keep if _m==3
. drop _m
. sort var1 var2
. compress

To me, all these lines are part of the same block. If I rewrite it as

. merge var1 var2 using data1; keep if _m=3; drop _m; sort var1 var2; compress;

then the next time I am reading the code again (say after a month), I don't need to read & understand what I did at every step - but instead what I did at that block.

Analogously, think about a 4 year old kid who looks at a word "cat" in a book and reads "c"-"a"-"t", and then tries to think what did the daycare teach him/her about "c"-"a"-"t", and then if he/she remembers "cat", they will blurt out "oh! It's cat". As an adult, we will look at "cat" and read it as "cat". That's pretty much what I am trying to achieve by putting multiple commands on a single line.

Hope that answers my original motivation for your question.

Best

p.s. I'm more used to Matlab

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Allan Reese (Cefas)
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2012 9:54 AM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: Stata commands : multiple commands in one text line is allowed

>> On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Pradipto Banerjee asked:
Is there a way in Stata to define ";" to interpret a carriage return?
>> For example, in my ado or do codes, I would like to write in a single line
>>    by xxx: gen yyy=zzz ; by xxx1: gen yyy1=zzz1 ; by xxx2: gen yyy2=zzz2

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Richard Herron suggested:
> Try -#delimit ;- to get a semicolon delimiter.  -#delimit cr- to get back to the default.
>
> (But I guess this is different than your ultimate desire to have more
>  than one command per line, which I don't think can be done.)

I thought the same as Richard but Kreshna Gopal has put me right.  I can find no mention of this on the list or in documentation, where #delimit is described for the facility to split a long command over several lines.  And I think we are all brainwashed to think that of a Stata command as a line.

However, within a DO/ADO file:

#delimit ;
set obs 10; g x=1; g y=2; list ;

works and so does this, though this example seems very bad style!

* This line is comment ; di "Fooled you!" ;

The main use I see is to pack several short assignments on one line so the vertical blocking in the text is more visible in a screen window; it doesn't appear to save measurable time or storage space.

Allan


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