Re: st: A bug in egen and gen?

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

You're saying, in effect, that nearly doubling storage would not
typically bite users. That will be true in some cases but not all.

There is no need to wonder. The help for -save- says there is no such
option. But -compress- before -save- is naturally a very good choice
and you could program your own wrapper for -save- that always did it.

Here is a sketch:

program jlsave
version 8
compress
save `0'
end

But if you do what you just said you wanted to do, -set type double-,
using -compress- is not going to give you back more than a fraction of
the extra storage you spend. The fraction will depend on how much you
deal with strings, always integer variables, etc.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Liao, Junlin <junlin-liao@uiowa.edu> wrote:

Storage wouldn't be a problem if we perform -compress- command
regularly. I'm wondering if Stata can let you select an option
whenever it saves data, it compresses. It will surely be handy to
solve this problem.

Nick Cox

> In practice, if StataCorp always warned you of everything that could bite you, the help would be much, much longer.
>
> Your last suggestion would typically leave -double-s in place unless it so happened that the result was integers in every observation. To see why, study Bill Gould's recent postings on the StataCorp blog.
> That would on average nearly double your storage. If you don't mind, you might as follow Stas' suggestion and -set type double-.
>
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