Massive Stata breakthrough: cowsay functionality

[Michael Droste]

Hi there Statalisters,

Great news! Cowsay functionality is now available in Stata. That's right, I know you all really wanted this.

I have posted a beta on Github for two reasons: (1) there may be bugs in highly complex programs like this; (2) I am not sure I can convince anyone to put this on SSC with only three animals.

https://github.com/mdroste/stata-cowsay

Feel free to help me add to the menagerie of potential animals, and please let me know in this topic if you have any additional feedback. Thanks!

[Jorrit Gosens]

Excellent. This will make so many tasks so much easier.
I do think the "moo" should be part of the standard output, and shouldn't be required to be explicitly typed by the user, so as to improve coding efficiency

[Mauricio Caceres]

If no animal is specified, cowsay should default to a cow without an error message. At the moment it prints

CRITICAL COWSAY ERROR: animal chosen () is not in the menagerie.
Currently supported animals: cow, pig, benny
Defaulting to cow.

This is detrimental to my workflow. Thanks!

[Maarten Buis]

I think ermistatas should be part of the menagerie: https://blog.stata.com/2018/03/27/er...erms-commands/

[Michael Droste]

If no animal is specified, cowsay should default to a cow without an error message. At the moment it prints

CRITICAL COWSAY ERROR: animal chosen () is not in the menagerie.
Currently supported animals: cow, pig, benny
Defaulting to cow.

This is detrimental to my workflow. Thanks!

Mauricio -- great catch! Your many useful improvements have been merged into the master branch. I have already noticed a huge improvement in my productivity.

[Andrew Lover]

Two comments:

cowsay "Productivity: to infinity and beyond!", animal(owl)

and I can only assume that Stata corp will be implementing this as part of the next update. Perhaps error codes could randomly cycle through -cowsay- options? Now THAT would be useful. Who's with me on demanding this functionality?