RE: st: A bug in egen and gen?

["Liao, Junlin" <junlin-liao@uiowa.edu>]

David,

The -doubletofloat- procedure is a nice addition to -compress-. It essentially makes up for what should be included in the -compress- procedure. People concerning with dataset size should be getting this one. Thanks.

Junlin

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of David Kantor
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 9:56 AM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: RE: st: A bug in egen and gen?

At 09:43 PM 2/17/2011, Junlin wrote:
>Unless someone changed the command, my version of Stata 11 does not
>compress double to float when it can do so. This is also indicated in
>the documentation. However, I can recast a variable to float if there
>is no loss of precision, otherwise I have to put in the /force option
>to force convert with loss of precision.

You may want to check
-ssc desc doubletofloat-

While -compress- does recast double to long, int or byte, it does not go double to float. Typing -recast float ...- is easy, but
-doubletofloat- provides some additional convenience.

You may also be interested in
-ssc desc floattolong-
That does not save space, but recasts to a possibly more appropriate type.
I use long, int, or byte, (depending on the range) whenever the value are sure to be integer.
What I'd like to see is an 8-byte integer type. Could be useful in some circumstances, for several reasons.

Finally, in response to Nick's comment,...

 > You always have to tell -generate-, etc. what variable type you  > want created. On the whole, I don't think that would be a popular  > change.

This is my choice. Maybe it's a result of my programming background, but when I create a variable, the first thing I want to know is what data type it should be. What kinds of values -- integer or fractional? What range? Based on that, I choose the appropriate type.
A command such as,
gen a = ...
looks risky to me, and I rarely do it. (I would do it only in manually-typed experiments. I would never do that in "live" work.) It could possibly have different results in different circumstances (depending on the default type). This habit is so ingrained, that I sometimes write, gen float a = ...

In summary, I almost never depend on the default; I work as if the data type were a required feature of -gen- and -egen-.
HTH
--David

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