Oops. Thank you, Scott.
An array is a general data object. It's a a vector when indexed by one
subscript, a matrix when indexed by two subscripts, or it can be
indexed by more than two subscripts. It can take numeric and character
elements. You can think of a numeric array A(i,j,k) as a list of i
matrices of (j,k) size. The ability to take non-numeric elements is
useless in statistics, but it's helpful in general data management.
In Stata or SAS we think of data sets as tables with as many columns
as variables and as many rows as the largest number of non-missing
observations. This works for statistical analysis. General-purpose
programming languages (judging by the two I dabble in) seem to want
you to think of your data in terms of data objects -- scalars,
vectors, matrices, lists, etc. R is a statistical analysis programming
environment, but it stayed close to this general-purpose way of
dealing with data; maybe because its underlying language, S, was
invented by a computer scientist?
Gabi
On Jan 31, 2008 10:14 PM, Scott Merryman <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2008 8:48 PM, Gabi Huiber <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I'm trying to cheat and speed things up a bit when dealing with a
> > bunch of files with names such as fileYYYYMMDD.dta. I could collect
> > the numeric part of the names in a column vector that starts with the
> > initial values a=J({potential number of files}, 1,0). But there is a
> > fair chance that my YYYYMMDD succession has gaps, so at the end of the
> > process this column vector will have some zeroes.
> >
> > I would like to do this:
> >
> > mata
> > a=sort(a,1)
> >
> > Then drop all the zero elements of a, and end up with a shorter
> > vector. But I can't find anything like "drop rows" in the Mata book or
> > Google. Any ideas?
>
> -select()- ?
>
> mata
> A = (1,2,3,4,0,5,6,0,0,7)
> A2 = select(A, A:>0)
> A2
> end
>
>
> > Generally, some R-like way to deal with arrays would be nice to have
> > in Mata or Stata.
>
> How do R arrays work?
>
> Scott
>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
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>
*
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