Re: st: Re: FORTRAN

[Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Joseph Coveney <jcoveney@bigplanet.com> wrote:
> Stata SpecialEdition wrote:
>
> I have been using STATA for two years now and I LOVE it. I now need to
> do some more complicated estimation in a language called FORTRAN. Is
> it possible to read my STATA files in FORTRAN? A colleague said it was
> impossible and I would have just save it as an ASCII. Is this the best
> way? I just wanted to check whether this is the case with some STATA
> (and hopefully FORTRAN experts).
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The format of Stata's dataset files (.dta) are published, and so, if you're up
> to it, you probably *could* read them with a suitable FORMAT / READ statement
> (or set of FORMAT / READ statements) in Fortran.  Like your colleague, though,
> I question the worthiness of such an undertaking for any applications that
> you're likely to encounter.
>
> I'd go with ASCII, just as your colleague says.
>
> Joseph Coveney
>

Other options would include:
1. OLE Automation in FORTRAN
2. A plugin in FORTRAN.

Both will delegate reading/writing data to Stata itself, and both will
provide you with
a possibility to get/set values of Data(var, obs). This should be
enough for most cases.

If you wish to create a standalone program in FORTRAN that can process
Stata datasets,
the FORTRAN source code to read/write Stata datasets is made available by Andrew
Shephard here (see STATAMOD section):
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpajs/software.htm

Best, Sergiy Radyakin



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