Thanks David Harrison and Nick Cox for their answers.
Thanks Nick for his opinion about using the letters in place of numbers - I'm
sort of forced into using the char() function because some data files refer to
the waves by number and others by letter. I share the data files with a few
others so I dare not change their names to fit my purposes.
Cheers!
Ada
Nick Cox wrote:
Taking another look at the code,
an alternative is
foreach i in c d e f {
global `i'indvars "pid `i'hid"
}
The point is mostly one of maintenance.
I wouldn't trust myself to remember that
char(99) is "c" for more than a few minutes.
More to the point, on revisiting the code
later a programmer (even the original
programmer) who shared this failure
of memory would have to work that out
afresh. Using the letters directly
is more transparent.
Nick
[email protected]
-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Cox
Sent: 15 February 2005 12:46
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: setting global in a loop
This is nothing to do with globals. In fact,
the error message is pointing in the right
direction.
If you want to use ; as a delimiter you must use
it after every (logical) command line. You
can't mix EOLs and semi-colons as delimiters
within a block of code. I hardly use this
practice, but I surmise that your code
should be
#delimit;
foreach i of numlist 3(1)6 { ;
local j : di char(`i'+96) ;
global `j'indvars "pid `j'hid" ;
};
#delimit cr;
Having said that, there is clearly no
compulsion to use ; here.
Incidentally
forval i = 3/6 {
is cleaner and faster than
foreach i of numlist 3(1)6 {
although the "faster" here is a
matter of a nanoblink.
Nick
[email protected]
Ada Ma
I have a problem. When I run the following program:
#delimit;
foreach i of numlist 3(1)6 {
local j : di char(`i'+96)
global `j'indvars "pid `j'hid";
}
#delimit cr;
I got an error code r(198) with a comment saying:
"program error: code follows on the same line as open brace"
I am working on the BHPS and I hope that I can draw the same
variables out from
the various waves using globals combined with a loop. Am I
doing anything wrong
or is global not allowed in a loop?
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