[ben earnhart]

I think the best solution would be to have Stata warn you when something is deprecated. If you use the old -merge- syntax, it works, but gives you a nice explanation/warning. Something like "NOTE: rmean has been superseded with rowmean. See help egen."

[Nicholas Winter]

I believe that index() stopped working a while after it was officially superseded by strpos(), but was then brought back by popular (old people) demand...

e.g.: http://hsphsun3.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/...ticle-777.html

[Nick Cox]

That's correct. The old people protested.

[Richard Williams]

I'd forgotten that even back in 2008 I was complaining about old names not working. I guess nobody listens to my complaints because I am young.