When it comes to defining local macros in a different place from where you use them, you have two options: a do-file you include as needed or an r-class program that you call as needed. I talked about it here and said that a program is a better choice, without any evidence to back up [...]

I was looking for an excuse to try something new and I decided to pick on one Notepad++ shortcoming that was handy: the Stata syntax highlighting gets utterly mangled after compound quotes -- `"`like so'"' -- which do sometimes arise, usually in the process of file open/file write.  Vim does not get confused by compound quotes [...]

The other day I wrote a program that needed to call a file as an argument -- with the full file path. My first pass at it was to capture the argument as usual, with say args input_file. But that would not have worked with file paths that have spaces in them. What might have [...]

In The Stata Journal Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009 there's a Stata tip (# 77) on re-using macros in multiple do-files, by Jeph Herrin. His solution is to define any local macros in a separate do-file, say locals.do. You can call that do-file with the include command at the top of any do-file that might [...]