The precision issue is elaborated at length in several sources already
referred to you.
. findit precision
And look at the FAQs and Stata Journal articles there listed.
The key point is that deep, deep down Stata is necessarily using binary
representations of decimal numbers. Some numbers can be held exactly,
some can't. So for example it is not correct either that "x actually
equals .2599999".
A secondary point is whenever you use -display- it uses a default
format, so -display- used in that way cannot be _guaranteed_ to show
exactly how Stata holds numbers.
Rather than recapitulating what's already been written up in detail in
various places, I encourage you to read, as earlier recommended.
Nick
n.j.cox@
Naunihal Singh
I think I understand a bit better what's going on.
replace y=1 if x==.26 fails because x actually equals .2599999
. di x[27]
.25999999
(this is strange b/c x was generated with this command: generate x=
(_n/100)-0.01 in 1/101 )
So the problem wasn't that float had too few digits of precision (both
.25 and .26 fit in the same number of bytes), it's that stata was
storing (27/100)-0.01 as .25999999 instead of .26.
I've tried using the round command to tackle this, but I must be doing
something wrong in the syntax:
replace x=round(x,0.01)
(0 real changes made)
even though
di round(.25999999, 0.01)
.26
Is there a problem with using round in replace in that way?
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