On Sun, 2 Jun 2019, Fred Engst wrote:

> I noticed a line of code that I didn’t know was possible from your 
> response earlier:
>
> "ols lwage 0 log(wage) —simple”
>
> Here you’ve invoked a function on the command line, i.e. log(wage), 
> not a existing series’ name. Other transformation is also possible, 
> such as ols y 0 y(-1 to 4) that I’ve noticed. This raises a question 
> about the nature of the indepvars in the ols documentation. What 
> other command line transformation that is possible without creating 
> a new variable first?

The argument passed to ols and related commands is a list (of series) 
and a list can only contain named series (members of the dataset, with 
ID numbers). So you can employ any function that returns a list, or 
that creates a named series. This includes

log, lags, diff, ldiff, sdiff, square, dummify, cdummify, dropcoll

You cannot, for example, do

ols y 0 x^3

because "x^3" just gives an anonymous result, that must be assigned a 
name and ID number before it can feature in a list.

This isn't documented as such; it probably should be. But for each of 
the relevant functions it's documented that they either return a list 
or create an automatically named series.

Allin

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