RE: st: A bug in egen and gen?

[Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk>]

--- On Thu, 17/2/11, Liao, Junlin wrote:
> I just fail to see your point " You can get some of that
> back by -compress-, but not all ". My experiment clearly
> proves that what matters is the "final" storage data
> type. I understand that by using double in place of float
> or long will increase requirement of memory. My point is
> that computing power is increasing exponentially. For
> example, any computers I use have at least 4GB of memory.
> The machine I load with Stata has 8GB. Memory is least of
> my concerns, but accuracy is always important.

If you store real data as double you are trying to regain
accuracy that does not exist in your data. All you have
done is doubled the size of your file to store random 
noise. -compress- will only help avoid this if your
variables are all integers. 

There are situations where storing or generating variables as
doubles make sense, but they are the exception not the rule.

-- Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------


      

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