Comments on: Turn a date into Stata format quickly

By: Nick Cox

Nick Cox — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:54:12 +0000

That's right. Once you write programs to be made public it is best to avoid all names that might be in use, which means any! The justifiable exceptions might -generate- variables with specific names, but that should be documented; the program should check whether they exist and bail out if they do; and there should be ways of supplying alternative names. That may sound a tough order but once you see why it becomes natural to write that way.

I suspect lots of users have variables called -x-!

By: Gabi Huiber

Gabi Huiber — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:49:45 +0000

You're right! I haven't thought of it because I don't ever have variables named x in my data (I expect my variable names to be more descriptive than that) but that's no excuse. Tempvar would have been better. Thank you.

By: Nick Cox

Nick Cox — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:12:21 +0000

What you say clashes with your code. The name -x- is used only within the program. Using -tempvar x- ensures no clash with an existing variable named -x-.

By: Gabi Huiber

Gabi Huiber — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 02:27:37 +0000

Hi Nick. You're right about order `v'; I could have posted a personal taste disclaimer there. But I'm not sure what the gain from tempvar is in this case. I do want to keep x for good, once it's renamed and labeled.

By: Nick Cox

Nick Cox — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:36:21 +0000

Interesting idea. Two small comments:

Better to work with a -tempvar x- than a permanent variable x.

Not everyone will want the result of -order `v'-.