RE: st: RE: Understanding the difference between gen and egen

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

At 03:14 AM 6/14/2006, Nick Cox wrote:
> I am not knocking -egen-. I may be its greatest
> fan in the Stata community. I have found it helpful
> in my own work to be able to use, and to write -egen-
> functions. But it is not, itself, an enormous deal. It is at root
> a rag-bag of convenient short-cuts. For example,
> if -egen, total()- did not exist, we could get
> there typically in two lines instead of one,
> as in
>
> bysort bar: egen foototal = total(foo)
>
> being done by
>
> bysort bar : gen foototal = sum(foo)
> by bar: replace foototal = foototal[_N]
I think that may understate egen's value a bit.  True, as far as 
typing goes, it may sometimes only save you a line or two.  But for 
many people it will also save the several hours it would take to 
figure out what those two or three lines would be!


-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
FAX:    (574)288-4373
HOME:   (574)289-5227
EMAIL:  Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.Edu
WWW (personal):    http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
WWW (department):    http://www.nd.edu/~soc 
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/