Compatibility of Stata 16 and Stata 17 outputs?

[Matthew Lala]

At my academic workplace I have Stata 16 MP (16.0, not updated -- long story, endless fights with the IT department). I have access to a secure data facility which allows either Stata 16.1 MP or (now) Stata 17.0 MP. I frequently export .dta, .gph, .ster, .do and .ado files from the secure data facility and work on them at my workplace. I used to use Stata 16 on both systems, but now would like to give Stata 17 a go.

I am assured by Richard Williams (https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...77#post1604777) that .dta files from Stata 17 will be readable in my Stata 16 MP. However in the past I have also faced compatibility issues between Stata versions when it comes to .ster files (previously, I could not read .ster estimates produced using Stata 15 in my Stata 14). Does anyone know whether there are any compatibility issues with the .gph, .ster, .do or .ado files across 16 and 17?

[Clyde Schechter]

I am reluctant to make general statements about compatibility, but I have one large project (still ongoing, actually) that began on Stata 15, migrated to Stata 16, and is now running on Stata 17, and I have not encountered any incompatibilities with .gph, .ster, .do, or .ado files, at least so far. I have made extensive use of all of those in this project.

Of course, it is part of my standard work practices to include a -version- statement near the top of each do-file to assure that changes in Stata will still reproduce the original results if rerun under a later version than the one it was developed under. But I definitely have version 17 do-files that are using .gph and .ster files that were created with versions 15 and 16, with no problems.

[Matthew Lala]

Hi Clyde, thank you very much for this, that's very useful.