To the extent that that is true, many Stata users
want to push it at new users, which is where the
thread started....
Nick
[email protected]
Richard Williams
> 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!
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