Re: st: statamod fortran library

[Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com>]

Daniel,

1) GNU Fortran compiler lists FSEEK as supported. No personal
experience. Description and example program here:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/FSEEK.html

2) For Stata 11 file you don't need to seek within the file at all (in
Stata 13 you do). All structures are of known size and you can read
them into memory one by one, without repositioning or jumping in the
file, but simply using the read statement, see e.g. how it is done in
line 627 of statamod.f90. The only thing I can imagine is that Fortran
holds arrays differently from e.g. C, but you should abstract that,
since the library is probably reading the file element by element, and
not overlaying native Fortran structures on top of the file data.

3) You can read the whole file into memory (subject to reasonable
considerations of file size vs memory size). Then stream from the
memory. In that case you can manipulate the pointers any way you like.

4) Seeing the message "strings not supported" tells me that there are
probably some serious limitations in this library. Perhaps consider
the examples in the Mata file io section. It is shown how to use mata
to write a numeric matrix into a file in your own format, which you
can then easily read with external program (e.g. your FORTRAN
consumer). You sacrifice some features as value/variable labels, etc.

5) This is definitely a FORTRAN question. You might get more concrete
solutions in one of the FORTRAN forums. Also look at this book:
http://www.springer.com/statistics/computational+statistics/book/978-0-387-23817-3

Best, Sergiy Radyakin


On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:00 PM, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> wrote:
> Has anyone had experience compiling the statamod library for
> reading and writing Stata .dta files (through version 11 only)
> with other than the Intel compiler? The library uses the
> non-standard ipfort module, but apparently only for fseek. Here
> is a link to the library source:
>
>    http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~asheph/software.htm
>
> Is there another source for this ability?
>
> Daniel Feenberg
> NBER
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