On s�ndag, okt 27, 2002, at 10:51 America/Montreal, baum wrote:
I don't see the issue here.
The issue is only one of convenience. Sometimes, in particular for
interactive use and exploration, it would have been convenient to have
string value labels. Convenience is not a minor issue -- if it were, I
would have chosen to do all statistical programming in C rather than
Stata.
My work is on yearly files 1986--2000 with on average about 4E6
individuals in each file. A group of people use these files, and I
should not change them on disk merely because it is convenient for
/me/. Constantly merging in other files is a nuisance for interactive
use (dealing with these data is slow enough as it is). Most people
probably work on smaller data sets where keeping local modified
versions is sensible, but I think enough people have data of this size
to make it worthwile to modify Stata itself if it would not slow Stata
down a lot.
It is not my intent to be difficult about this, if someone can come up
with a good reason why Stata should /not/ have string labels, I am
willing to modify my opinion. That a workaround is possible is not in
itself a good reason.
kind regards,
Erik
--
Erik �. S�rensen, <http://www.geocities.com/erik_oiolf/>.
phd student (economics), Norwegian School of Economics.
currently visiting Queen's University, Kingston Ontario.
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