Dear statalisters,
I am using -ml- to maximize a multiple equation model. One of the
steps in calculating the likelihood involves finding a particular
solution to a quartic.
I have written a function to do this in maple, and now want to use this
from within stata. I am hoping to do this by calling maple from stata
. shell maple < maple_command_file
and writing the result from maple into a file, then reading that into
stata as I don't believe stata will accept a return value from shell.
Can I assign the contents of a file (which I know will be a single
number) to a scalar? How?
I'd rather not mess about with reading the single value using -infile-,
bc then I'd have to -preserve-/-restore- my rather large dataset each
time.
I know I could also try using -bisect- from within Stata, but suspect
maple would be significantly faster if only I could get the 2 programs
to communicate nicely. My worry with using maple is the errors that
might result from forcing stata and maple to read/write representations
of numbers to files.
Thanks for any suggestions, Chris.
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