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.
Chris's best solution probably involves the -file- command, which can read
values from a file directly into a scalar. Type -help file-, which should
give you the answer if your version of Stata 7 dates from mid-2000 or
later. (-file- is not necessarily found in Stata 7 manuals, as the first
sub-version of Stata 7 didn't contain it.)
