Programming features

• sophisticated parsing
• looping and branching
• markup and control language
• access to internal systems variables
• binary and ASCII file I/O
• ODBC/SQL support
  
• Access to files on the Internet
  
• list processing
• path and file utilities
• extensive set of functions for string and data manipulation, including regular expressions
• window management
  
• Automation
  

Object-orientated programming

• inheritance
• encapsulation of data structures and programs
• program name overloading

Menu and dialog programming language

• add items to existing menus
• add new menus
• create dialog interfaces

Programming utilities for

• debugging programs
• measuring convergence
• marking relevant sample
• saving results**
• handling time-series variables
• confirming variable types
• controlling display formats
• Parsing factor variables**
  

Extensibility

• ability to add new commands to Stata
• Ado: scripting language
  
• Mata: C/C++-like compiled (byte-code) matrix programming language
• access to source of many Stata commands and Mata functions
• plugins (DLLs or shared objects)

• Create applications with the power of Stata inside them; see the Numerics by Stata page for more information.