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From | Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk> |
To | statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu |
Subject | RE: RE: st: A bug in egen and gen? |
Date | Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:59:22 +0000 (GMT) |
--- On Fri, 18/2/11, Liao, Junlin wrote: > Out of curiosity, do you know the maximum difference that > the -recast- procedure allows to recast a variable from > double to float? The answer would have to be in terms of relative differences not absolute differnces. I am still not as good at thinking in binary as Bill, so I use the rule of thumb that in float the first seven (decimal) digits are accurate, while for double it will be the first 16 digits. If you have very large numbers to begin with, the absolute difference could be in the 10s, 100s, 1000s or even 10000s (compare Bill's example of storing the US deficit as either a float or a double or: <http://blog.stata.com/2011/02/10/how-to-read-the-percent-21x-format-part-2/>) -- Maarten -------------------------- Maarten L. Buis Institut fuer Soziologie Universitaet Tuebingen Wilhelmstrasse 36 72074 Tuebingen Germany http://www.maartenbuis.nl -------------------------- * * 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/