Austin,
Thanks for your feedback. You seem to be contradicting yourself
on occassions but some people do that now and then.
If vincenty is critical, then why are you now recommending codes
not based on vincenty? You already know that vincenty makes no
important differences for the distance less than 100 miles.
Please do make the calculations for us and tell us how this
will impact someone's research.
I agree -distmatch- can be made to run faster (it should recycle
previous rankings) but not for the reason you posted.
Your are forgeting to mention that your codes cannot perform ranking
or complete matching. It only looks for the minimum distance.
This has been pointed out you before.
I would post another comparison except for the fact that your codes
do not work for other matchings.
You seem to be creating a moving target with ad hoc fixes, and
suggest other people do the same. If they can do this, why would
they need you?
Are we stuck in the twilight zone where people does not need help
but in fact should be made to take one when offered.
There is something funny about people who claim exlusive expertise.
Let's agree it is a very bad idea to tell other people to not use
someone's else program.
Roy
P.S. You can take your download programs to the data center just
like other programss. Just put it in the current directory if you
still do not know how to do this.
> Roy--
> I also have no problem downloading others' work, and my hard drive is
> cluttered with the output of Jann, Baum, Schaffer, Jenkins, Cox, and
> many others. I seem to use one of Ben Jann's programs every day. And
> one of my posted solutions on this topic requires downloading
> -vincenty- (from SSC), which gives much better distance estimates,
> though at a substantial time cost.
>
> I am not even claiming that -distmatch- has no utility--no doubt many
> will find it useful. But I'm afraid I don't see your point in this
> post at all--you claim in the help file that -distmatch- "take several
> minutes to complete" for 3000 obs, and other methods take "days if not
> weeks" yet the method that I have outlined in several posts is
> entirely general (i.e. it can be customized to produce any range of
> statistics for any range of neighbors, which no program can claim to
> do) and runs faster than -distmatch- in many cases, e.g. by a factor
> of four or five here:
>
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