Re: st: RE: Taking averages, etc.

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu>]

At 06:34 AM 12/17/2003 -0600, Fred Wolfe wrote:
> However, as Nick will probably tell you soon, there is much to said for 
> simplicity and clarity. I prefer to define the if condition into 
> individual variables together with textual notes or labels to state what 
> the variables mean. Complicated code is all well and good when you are 
> writing it, but when you come back to the program 6 months later the code 
> is very difficult to understand.
>
> Fred
Thanks Fred.  To me, an if-then-else structure is simpler, clearer and less 
error prone.  Not only is it used by SPSS, it is used by most programming 
languages I have worked with.  And, it is easy enough to add comments 
explaining what the code does, which I think should be done with anything 
you might go back to 6 months later.

Part of this bias no doubt reflects familiarity though.  One of the things 
I like about Stata is that even if I have never used a statistical 
procedure before, I can pretty much guess what its basic syntax will be 
like and how to use post-estimation commands for it.  This is certainly not 
true of SPSS!  But, when it comes to data base manipulation, the learning 
curve is much greater.  There are a lot of commands, functions, etc.  It 
may be that Stata is better at data base manipulation than SPSS -- I really 
don't know -- but my practice right now is to often get the data ready in 
SPSS and then convert it into Stata format.


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