Thank you all for your kind responses. Indeed, using double solved this
annoying and important problem (the numbers are id numbers of patients). I
think that double (not float) should be a default setting in STATA. Saving
some memory is an important issue for only a small percentage of problems.
Andrzej
On 1/28/06 8:15 PM, "Neil Shephard" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/29/06, Andrzej Niemierko <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Could someone please explain to me the following strange behaviour? When I
>> generate a new variable:
>> gen x1=3366161 and then:
>> gen x2=10*x1
>> the number that I get for x2 is 33661608 (not the correct number 33661610).
>> When the initial x1 number is 3366162 the x2 is correct, that is 33661620.
>> Any help?
>> Sorry if this is double post (from a different account).
>
> Its not a problem specific to Stata, but is more general to copmuters
> and boils down to the fact that computers work in binary and there are
> some numbers that you can't represent accurately in binary.
>
> For a brief overview in Stata see -man datatypes-, but for more
> information see some the archives, heres a start (searched using the
> term "precision")...
>
> http://www.stata.com/slsearch.cgi?q=precision&t=statalist
>
> HTH's
>
> Neil
> --
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>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
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*
* For searches and help try:
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