Re: st: options for syntax checking do files before running

[Christopher Zbrozek <zbrozek@gmail.com>]

Thanks, Nick!

I agree it's best to use Stata's syntax checker... and, cough, ahem,
if anyone from Statacorp is listening, if users had the ability in a
future release to quickly scan a dofile for syntax errors using the
executable's syntax checker (without actually needing running the code
on a dataset), you'd have some happy users in Ann Arbor.

Best,
Christopher Zbrozek
University of Michigan

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think there is any such program. It would be foolish of me to
> rule out the possibility of some script that catches common errors,
> but my experience is that it is best to let Stata itself find your
> bugs and miscodings as fast as possible.
>
> Nick
>
> Nick
> njcoxstata@gmail.com
>
>
> On 8 April 2013 20:28, Christopher Zbrozek <zbrozek@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello world,
>>
>> Is anyone aware of user-written code that would review a do file to
>> ensure commands are written using valid Stata syntax? Or,
>> alternatively, is there a way to exploit the Stata executable's
>> internal syntax checker for this purpose?
>>
>> The idea is that because Stata code is interpreted rather than
>> compiled, clearly boneheaded syntax errors aren't caught until
>> runtime. For example, when insufficiently caffeinated this morning, I
>> tried to use a command along the lines of
>>
>> replace myvar = "something" if missing(myvar) | if regexm(myvar, "myregex")
>>
>> which, with that second "if" in there, works about as well as one
>> thinks it should.
>>
>> One (quasi-)solution is of course to debug code using a small sample
>> dataset before running it on millions of observations, which
>> ameliorates but doesn't fix the problem. A rather laborious solution
>> would be to write an ado file or Perl script or something to find
>> common syntax errors and run that at the top of a do file on the text
>> of the do file itself. An ideal solution would be to somehow employ
>> the syntax checking Stata will perform anyway rather than trying to
>> reverse-engineer that portion of the Stata executable.
>>
>> Many thanks,
>>
>> Christopher Zbrozek
>> University of Michigan
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