• Sophisticated parsing
• Looping and branching
• Markup and control language
• Access to internal system variables
• Binary and ASCII file I/O
• List processing
• Path and file utilities
• Extensive set of functions for string and data manipulation, including regular expressions
• Window management

Programming utilities for

• Debugging programs
• Measuring convergence
• Marking relevant sample
• Saving results
• Handling time-series variables
• Confirming variable types
• Controlling display formats

Object-oriented 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

Extensibility

• Ability to add new commands to Stata
• Mata: C-like compiled (byte-code) matrix programming language
• Access to source of many Stata commands and Mata functions
• Plugins (DLLs or shared objects)