Re: st: Stata 9 announcement

[Nick Winter <nw53@cornell.edu>]

At 09:07 AM 4/6/2005 -0500, you wrote:
> At 08:46 AM 4/6/2005 -0500, Alan Riley wrote:
> > In Stata 9, value labels have a maximum length of 32,000
> > characters.  When reading a Stata 9 dataset, Stata 8 is
> > "smart" enough to not read in any value labels that would
> > exceed the Stata 8 limit.
> Thanks Alan.  Just as a matter of curiosity, why would somebody even want 
> a 32,000 character value label (or even 244 or 80?)  I suppose you could 
> put an entire questionnaire into your value label if you were so 
> inclined!  But for documentation purposes, I would think there would be 
> better approaches than trying to cram so much information into a value label.
>
> My own bias is to have nice, short labels (Stata output generally 
> truncates after around 10 or 11 characters anyway, right?)  But perhaps I 
> overlook some benefits here.
One thing that occurs to me is to use this in conjunction with support for 
multiple languages, in order to include complete questionnaire wording in 
one set of labels, and shorter "analysis" labels in another.

There was a presentation at NASUG last year by Theodore Pollari & Phil 
Schumm on using Stata as the base for a fully-integrated questionnaire 
development, questionairre production, and analysis system--I imagine the 
longer labels might be helpful in that sort of context.  See 
http://ideas.repec.org/p/boc/asug04/6.html.

--Nick WInter





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