Thanks to Kit Baum, the package -matvsort- has been
revised on SSC.
-matvsort- was published in STB-56. It sorts
a row or column vector into numeric order.
-matvsort- has been updated to Stata 8.
In particular, it now longer changes the
sort order of the data. The previous version
remains in the package as -matvsort6- for
users of Stata 6 or 7.
I would not have updated this program without
a problem posed by Walter Forrest, which
has led to two additional programs being
added to the package.
-matrsort- sorts the rows of a matrix into
numeric order.
-matcsort- sorts the columns of a matrix into
numeric order.
Both require Stata 8.
You may well wonder whether -matvsort- (for
a vector) is now needed, given the more general
programs to sort matrices. However, if
we sort a vector, it always makes sense
to sort the row or column names at the same
time. So
pi 3.14159
e 2.71828
gamma 0.57722
can clearly be sorted to
gamma 0.57722
e 2.71828
pi 3.14159
However, if each row or column of a matrix
with more than one row and more than one
column is sorted, in general names
must be abandoned.
There remains the valid problem of sorting
a matrix's rows or columns according
to the values in _one_ specified row or
column, not tackled here.
Nick
[email protected]
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