To follow up on my earlier posting, two additional convenience functions
are now available from Nick Cox' egenmore. Both are for presentation of
time data.
egen function elap(time) displays the human-readable time associated with a
time interval, in days:hours:minutes:seconds. The time variable might be
derived from those generated by the dhms() function.
egen function elap2(time1 time2) displays the human-readable time
associated with the interval time1 to time2, which must be non-negative, in
days:hours:minutes:seconds.
The convenience provided by these functions is decidedly less than the
ability to apply such a format to a variable measuring elapsed time: that
is, to convert a time interval of 15432.2501 into 432:06:00:08 for display.
That would require changes to -format-, which is a built-in command.
StataCorp programmers will have to decide whether time intervals should be
represented in terms of fractional Stata dates (as these routines do), or
as seconds since the beginning of Stata time (as does SAS in its
timestamps, or does *nix with a zero date one decade later). Given
maintenance of appropriate precision, the choice of units is immaterial. Of
course, the number of seconds since 01-jan-1960 will overflow a 32-bit long
int around 2028, but by that time Stata version 14 will be running on
virtual nanocomputers with 256-bit word length anyway...or will those of us
still extant just think of what we want done with the data?
ssc install egenmore, replace will get the new functions.
