Dear all,

I am working with the matrix coding of stata, which is new to me, and I am struggling with a simple question. I looked up on google and searched everywhere, but I still do not find a solution. I hope here someone can help me.

Basically, I am creating a let's say 4x2 matrix that we can call mymatrix. Then I name the 2 columns of the matrix as "a" and "b".
I wish to assign values at the corresponding row and column using the name of the columns instead of their "number". Therefore the code I would like to have should look like this:

Code:
 clear all
mat mymatrix = J(4,2,.)
mat colnames mymatrix=a b
mat mymatrix[1,"a"] = 4
mat mymatrix[1,"b"] = 5

svmat double mymatrix, name(col)
However, it does not work because instead of the column names, stata need to have the number of the column in the code to fill in the numbers in the matrix.

Does anyone know how I could do this?

Any help or suggestion would much be appreciated!
Thanks to all in advance