Hi all,

This is a bit of an odd request, and it might end up going nowhere.

I am the current maintainer of the long-running metan user-written command for meta-analysis, and I recently released a major overhaul to the code. However, despite adding many new features etc., I was careful to write the code in such a way as so it could continue to be used by older Stata versions -- e.g. the "version" statement in the ado-file is "version 11.0".

I have been contacted by a Stata 13.1 user who is seeing an error message when running the new version. I asked them to use the "trace" command, and it appears that the error is "code 197" relating to the parsing of a "syntax" statement. I cannot see anything wrong with the statement, and indeed it runs just fine for me under Stata 16.1. So I am wondering: did anything in Stata change, say around version 13 or 14, which might cause a 197 error before, but not after? For example, might there previously have been a macro length limit, leading to truncation? Or a specific part of "syntax" syntax (if that makes sense!) that was changed? (I can't find anything in "whatsnew".)

Other things I've checked: there are no non-standard characters (at least, that I can see in Notepad++), and the "trace" output doesn't seem to suggest that "commented" text is an issue, using either star, double-backslash, or slash-star-star-slash.

If there are any users of older versions of Stata, particularly 13.1, who have a few minutes to spare... could I humbly request that you install/upgrade to the latest (Dec 2020; via SSC) version of metan and try running the help-file examples, and see if any 197 errors emerge? Or could I hear from any users who have encountered 197 errors, maybe in other contexts, and could suggest things for me to check?

Many many thanks in advance,

David.