st: Stata vs Fortran

["Allan Reese (Cefas)" <allan.reese@cefas.co.uk>]

This discussion seems to have gone off topic, and stata.se (why hide
behind pseudonym?) has not indicated what Fortran properties Stata,
Mata, or any other language cannot replicate.  I would suggest that
within any complex calculation (supercomputers, multiple processors have
been mentioned), the overhead of learning how to read a formatted Ascii
file into Fortran will be trivial.  It is also likely that the data file
in Stata will contain variables not needed in the Fortran calculation.

My credentials: my first computer language was Fortran 66, and
subsequently learned Fortran 77 among the 6 languages we covered in a
one-year computer science course.  Subsequently worked on university
helpdesk with many Fortran users.

Reasons for caution:
1) Our Fortran compilers could build in various levels of run-time
checks (eg overflow, array bound checks).  Some people who wrote the
most complicated programs would turn all the checks off, which made the
code run much faster but with far less confidence in the answers!
2) Stata.se's reason for choosing Fortran may be the availability of
excellent and well-proven routines (eg Nag library).  I would encourage
using such code.  Another helpdesk caller had written his own subroutine
for numerical integration but asked for help as it was slow and
convergence was poor.  His routine took 30 seconds per call; the Nag
equivalent took 0.1 seconds, had been validated as accurate, and would
detect non-convergent functions.
3) Maybe you don't want to learn Fortran's READ statement, but how will
you get to see the results without learning WRITE?  And WRITE is still
the most powerful tool for debugging your logic.

Fortran had, and has, the advantage of being a language completely
defined by a standard, though I once looked at a program that started
with the comment, "This program is written to the Fortran standard
except we rely on accessing absolute memory addresses."

The original query included, "Is it possible to read my STATA files in
FORTRAN? A colleague said it was impossible and I would have just save
it as an ASCII."  Colleague is clearly wrong, or misquoted.  

Allan



***********************************************************************************
This email and any attachments are intended for the named recipient only.  Its unauthorised use, distribution, disclosure, storage or copying is not permitted.  If you have received it in error, please destroy all copies and notify the sender.  In messages of a non-business nature, the views and opinions expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the organisation from which it is sent.  All emails may be subject to monitoring.
***********************************************************************************


*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/