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Archive for July 2019

Compatibility and reproducibility

I saw a tweet the other day where someone claimed that StataCorp ensures that the dataset format in Stata X is always different from Stata X-1.

This reminded me of an email I wrote a few years ago to a user who had questions about backward compatibility and reproducibility. I’m going to use large parts of that email in this blog post to share my thoughts on those topics.

I understand the frustration of incompatibilities between software versions. While it may not ease the inevitable difficulties that arise, I would like to explain our efforts in this regard. Read more…