Confall issue with STATA 16

[Juan Albertorio]

Hello,

I have a question for you. I am using STATA 16. I would like to know if someone have issue with Confall. It is not running in STATA 16.


Many thanks for considering my request.

Juan

[Nick Cox]

confall is community-contributed from the Stata Journal.

"not running" in Stata 16 could mean

1. It's not been installed. Use your operating system to search for files on your computer.

2. It has been installed, but Stata can't see it. Same as #1, but check

adopath

3. Something else: you need to tell us what "not running" means.

[Hemanshu Kumar]

I did find a problem with confall, though of course I cannot be sure it is the same problem as the one OP is facing.

I downloaded the ancillary file diabdata.dta available with the package, and then tried running the commands in the "examples" section of the command help. I get this:

. use diabdata, clear
. logistic diabetes BMI Age Sex IGT ACR CRP Cholesterol DiastolicBP GGT Smoking Drinking
[output omitted]

. confall, lockterm(Age Sex) eform(OR)
Please wait........{ required
r(100);

The error does not appear to be specific to Stata 16; I get the same thing on Stata 18.5/MP as well.

I ran a trace on the command, and the problem appears to happen on line 327 of the confall.ado file, which calls scatter. The error itself appears to be generated by scatter.ado:

- scatter `b' `showvar1' `baicm' `bbicm' `b0' `bfull' `xforgr', `saving' `options' `ytitle' `prxlab'
= scatter __000001    __000005 __00000A __00000B,   ytitle("OR")
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- begin scatter ---
  - if (_caller() < 8.2) version 8
{ required
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- end scatter ---

I find this confusing, because if (_caller() < 8.2) version 8 is legal code, as far as I know. Perhaps someone else can chime in?

Incidentally, both my Stata installations use scatter.ado version 1.2.0 dated 16apr2007.

[Juan Albertorio]

Hello Nick and Hemanshu,
Apologies for not being so clear. The problem that Hemanshu exposed is the same problem that I face, too. The stata does not run the command and the " (required" shows too. It also happens with other datasets that I used. I send an email to the original author Zhiqiang Wang- [email protected]) but it seems that he move on.

I would appreciate if anyone has an idea of how to solve this. Confall is quite good, but it is an old program, and I don't know who may fix it.

Many thanks.

Juan

[Hemanshu Kumar]

Can you show us the exact command you are trying to execute? Even better, please also include an extract of your data using the dataex command so that we can replicate your situation.

[Hemanshu Kumar]

Okay, I may have a workaround; for this you will need to make a small edit to the confall.ado file. You can find the location of this file on your machine by typing

which confall

Once you have the file path, type

doedit "the/filepath/to/confall.ado"

This will open up the file to edit in the Do-file editor. You will see that line 6 of the file has a version command. Comment it out:

* version 7.0

Now save the file. To make sure your next call to confall uses the new version of the file, simply enter

capture program drop confall

in the Command window, so that the current version is dropped from memory. Now you should be able to run the command fine.

Further note: the code in the examples.do file included in the ancillary files of the project still doesn't run without errors, because those examples pass a variable to the command, whereas the program syntax does not permit this. However, the three examples of the command in its help page work with the above change.

[Nils Enevoldsen]

To expand on why this is happening, the version of -scatter- included with the last several Stata releases can only be called from version 8 and later, because it includes the line

if (_caller() < 8.2) version 8

In Stata version 7, if required braces:

. version 7 : if 1 {assert 1}

. version 7 : if 1 assert 1
{ required
r(100);

In Stata version 8, if no longer required braces:

. version 8 : if 1 assert 1

This is explained in the version 8 release notes:

. help whatsnew7to8

In the case of if, you may omit the braces altogether:

if (exp) ...

So because -confall- runs as version 7 and calls -scatter-, it will break on every Stata version since version 9 (or thereabouts).

[Chen Samulsion]

Thank you Hemanshu Kumar, Nils Enevoldsen. Follow your guide, just make a small modification in confall.ado.
Locate your confall.ado, open it, find the following code:

scatter  `b' `showvar1' `baicm' `bbicm' `b0' `bfull' `xforgr', `saving' `options' `ytitle' `prxlab'

and replace it with:

version 8: twoway scatter  `b' `showvar1' `baicm' `bbicm' `b0' `bfull' `xforgr', `saving' `options' `ytitle' `prxlab'

webuse lbw
logit low age lwt race smoke ptl ht ui
confall, eform(OR)