st: more efficient techniques

[Michael Alexander <Michael.Alexander@aifs.gov.au>]

Hi Statalist

In the interests of learning some more efficient programming techniques, 
I am wondering anyone can suggest a way to improve the following code. 
Ideally, I would like to do away with the second -foreach- statement, 
which is just a repeat of the first with arguments changed (valm5 for 
valm3 and m5b for m4). In this case it was no big deal to just copy the 
first statement and amend its contents, but if I had 20 occurences then 
I would obviously want to automate the process. I assume a solution 
would have to do with using an additional -foreach- statement but not 
quite sure how this would work when I have two arguments that need to 
change on each loop through.

Thanks in anticipation

gen hsecostw=0 if inlist(m1, 1, 6, 7, 8)
local i=1
foreach x of numlist 1 2 12 52 {
   replace hsecostw = valm3/`x' if valm3>=0 & m4==`i'
   local ++i
}
local i=1
foreach x of numlist 1 2 12 52 {
   replace hsecostw = valm5/`x' if valm5>=0 & m5b==`i'
   local ++i
}

--
Michael Alexander
Principal Research Fellow
Australian Institute of Family Studies

300 Queen Street 
Melbourne VIC 3000

Tel: 03 9214 7841
Fax: 03 9214 7839
Mob: 0419 406 078
Email: Michael.Alexander@aifs.gov.au
Web-site: www.aifs.gov.au

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