Modular programming in Stata

Stata provides an easy and effective way of programming and distributing user-written additions to Stata’s command universe. However, a Stata programmer may face problems when trying to distribute an ado-file whose code in turn depends on one or many other self-written or third-party user-written routines. Distributing the ado-files as a package may not be appropriate, or it may be cumbersome in terms of compilation and maintenance. The user-written command copycode facilitates code production, code certification, code maintenance, and code distribution in a context of extensive ado-file programming with many interdependencies among user-written files. Its main purpose is to assemble ado-files for distribution that are nondependent on other user-written files. It does so by copying the relevant code into one file. The programmer’s burden of keeping track of all first-order and higher dependencies is reduced to the compilation of a list of first-order dependencies, which is given to copycode as an input. copycode will then assemble a ready-to-distribute, nondependent ado-file that contains unique first-order and higher Stata subroutines and Mata code as private functions.