Re: st: Re: Problem with variable names using Insheet

["Joseph Coveney" <stajc2@gmail.com>]

Nick Cox wrote:

Not so curious if you think about the history. When variable names
could not be very long (originally an 8 character limit) it no doubt
seemed more obvious that groups of variables could be managed by
having the same prefix. Managing suffixes too would have been a
stretch, although not illogical.

-renpfix- was added as an official command some years before -rensfix-
(STB) was published as a user-written command. As you made clear
earlier in the thread, both are superseded for Stata 12 users by the
new -rename-.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know;  over the years, I've received innumerable SAS transport 5 files
to work on, which have the same restriction on the length of variable names.
Clients seemed to choose suffixes about as often as they did prefixes despite
the limit.  Perhaps -renpfix- was mainly to deal with initial underscores.

Joseph Coveney

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