--- "Nichols, Austin" <[email protected]> wrote:
> It's unclear to me why StataCorp has never integrated
> better data management tools in the executable (e.g.
> why not zip and unzip all data on the fly?)
One reason is possibly platform dependence. Or a philosophical one: To do A &
B do you want one program to do A and one to do B, or a more complicated
program to do A & B? Because Stata is flexible you can integrate it with
other tools to do what you want. So if I wanted it to un-"zip" files for me on
the fly I could write usezip.ado
prog def usezip
version 8.2
!unzip `0' > XxYyZz
use XzYyZz
erase XxYyZz
end
And I'm sure some one else can do this slicker so it doesn't write the
unzipped data to the HD again, but just puts it in ram. And I wrote this for
the linux machines I use, so one can work out variants for other platforms or
other compressed file formats.
The point being Stata makes it fairly easy to customize its behavior to what
you want, with only a little practice.
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