st: format problem

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Andrzej writes

Thank you all for your kind responses. Indeed, using double solved this
annoying and important problem (the numbers are id numbers of  
patients). I
think that double (not float) should be a default setting in STATA.  
Saving
some memory is an important issue for only a small percentage of  
problems.


Personal preferences differ. I do not want to make double the default  
for my 600 Mb .dta file, or I would not have the RAM to read it (and  
many of the .dta files used in my research are of that nature).  
Fortunately Stata (not STATA) provides

set type double, permanently

if this setting is your preference.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html


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