OK, so UltraEdit is not that expensive and I have yet to see an unfavorable opinion of it. But Notepad++ works fine for me, and as of today it works even better. Like most everybody, I indent my code. I use tabs for that. Tabs are convenient, but they are set to different widths for [...]

Lately I have been writing a lot of modular Stata code, where bits and pieces of the job are done by separate programs, sometimes declared in different do-files (called in with do). You get programs to pass on things to each other by making them rclass. Now, r() results can be scalars as in this [...]

I have a project where I need to do some things to all files whose names start with "sub" but not "subs". The former are files I receive, the latter are files I produce. When it occurred to me that their common file name root might cause problems, I rewrote my code to name the [...]

R took a long time to compile yesterday because it depends on all kinds of things that I didn't have installed already. One of them is the Tcl/Tk language, which apparently comes from two separate FreeBSD ports -- one named tcl85 and the other tk85. The latter made trouble. It aborted the installation and it [...]

My installation of R 2.8.1-1 is in progress as I write this. The original instructions for installing R on FreeBSD are at the R Wiki, but before you dash there, you may want to know that I had to make some changes. They are listed below: First, the good news: on my FreeBSD 7.0 installed [...]

My previous C++ post illustrated how structs worked. The same example -- reading student names and grades from a .csv file into an array of Student structs -- can be used to illustrate the differences between C-style strings -- null-terminated arrays of characters -- and the class string. The advantage of using the class string, [...]

I just made a couple of changes to this theme's style sheet. I wanted a slightly wider page in order to accommodate longer lines of code. I needed it because some code lines in my Dummy variables post ran over when rendered in IE and Opera. If you cut and pasted the code, errant end-of-line [...]