st: Calculating Euclidean Distance

[Anthony Laverty <anthonylav@googlemail.com>]

Dear Statalist



I have data on patient numbers at various hospitals and am trying to
calculate a new variable which is the Euclidean distance between one
specific hospital (say A) and all of the others, so that i can select
which hospitals had the most similar number of patients across all
months.  The data is more or less arranged like this (although it has
a few more columns not of direct interest to this question):

Hospital     Time           Patients
A                 1                 456
A                 2                 759
A                 3                  236
B                 1                 214
B                 2                 854
B                 3                 325
C                 1                 250
C                  2                321
C                  3                852



So, i want to cycle through each time period and calculate the
difference squared between hospital A and all of the other hospitals
individually as one new variable.



Any suggestions greatly appreciated



Anthony Laverty

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