NetCourse 251: Writing Your Own Stata Commands

Parsing Stata syntax/Stata programming basics

• Review of Stata’s programming features
• Parsing
• Parsing options
• Parsing complicated syntax
• Aside on subprograms

Parsing Stata syntax, continued: Quotes, returned results, and subsamples

• Quotes
• Development continues
• Temporary variables
• Development continues
• An aside concerning r()
• Programming the formulas
• Putting it together

Using scalars and macros and introduction to low-level parsing

• What you must learn
• Scalars
• Binary accuracy
• Accuracy of macros versus scalars
• Converting a program from macros to scalars
• Handling by() options
• Sorting
• Low-level parsing
• Programming immediate commands
• Rewriting mytt in terms of mytti
• Parsing new variables

Returning results and writing estimation commands

• Where are we?
• Stored results
• What can be returned in r()?
• Referring to returned results in other programs
• Referring to returned results in the program that sets them
• Other types of returned values: s() and e()
• S-class returned values
• E-class returned results
• Writing postestimation commands
• Writing an estimation (e-class) command
• An alternative estimation command outline
• Writing estimation commands from first principles
• Writing estimation commands via maximum likelihood

List processing, controlling program output, and naming conventions

• Restricting commands to the relevant subsample
• Which is better: marksample or mark?
• Programming by varlist:
• Lists
• Creating lists
• Stepping through list elements one by one
• Deleting elements from lists
• Adding elements to lists
• Macro vectors
• Parsing revisited: gettoken
• quietly blocks
• The relation between capture and quietly
• capture blocks
• Naming conventions
• Program-naming convention
• Calling convention
• Version control