This column will focus on how to improve your fluency in Stata. Over the next issues we will look at Stata problems of intermediate size which turn out to be soluble with a few command lines. As an introduction, systematic ways of repeating the same or similar operations are surveyed to give one...

Three commands in official Stata, foreach, forvalues, and for, provide structures for cycling through lists of values (variable names, numbers, arbitrary text) and repeating commands using members of those lists in turn. All these commands may be used interactively, and none is restricted to use...

Various problems in working through lists are discussed in view of changes in Stata 8. for is now undocumented, which provokes a detailed examination of ways of processing lists in parallel with foreach, forvalues, and other devices, including new, concise ways of incrementing and decrementing...