Potential future improvements

Users are welcome to contribute by starting an Issue.

• A scanner that can look into Stata code to determine targets and dependencies, similar to existing scanners for C, Fortran and LaTeX.

  • There might be some ideas in this intriguingly titled Medium post by Asjad Naqvi, Parsing Stata dofiles for variable lists, which unfortunately is behind a paywall.
  • A more modest version would be to scan do-files (or log-files) for keywords that indicate targets (e.g., save, saving, graph export, export delimited, file write, etc.) and dependencies (e.g., use, import, etc.) and print the lines of code containing these keywords to a file. This would semi-automate the process of searching do-files (and others, e.g., ado-files) for inputs and outputs, although the user would still have to code these into an SConstruct by hand.
  • Similarly, a program could be written to compare timestamps or signatures of all files (or all files of a certain type, e.g., all dta, .sters, .gph, .tex, etc.) in a directory before and after a do-file is run to see which files have changed.

• Replicate nice features of Robert Picard's project, including

  • project, replicate
  • project, archive
  • project, validate