David--
As may be inferred from my post (by someone with superhuman insight),
I think it is much easier to -merge- and then compute within nested
loops, one across all i persons, and one across all j hospitals, as
Nick does in -nearest- but as always, YMMV.
On 1/3/07, David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net> wrote:
In response to Kelly Richardson's question about the distance between
home and hospital:
The structure of this situation suggests a -cross- operation on the
two datasets (persons and hospitals) -- at least in theory.
This would yield a _very_ long dataset. But this is impractical
You might want to loop through one person at a time, joining hospital
data; then select the nearest (or, say the nearest 5 hospitals); then
somehow output just these (maybe using -post-).