Re: st: best practice for dates and times

["Joseph Coveney" <jcoveney@bigplanet.com>]

Junlin Liao wrote:

. . . I thought -clock- or -Clock- would be smart enough to figure it out by 
itself.   . . . I think there again is a chance for Stata to get smart.

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I'm inclined to agree with Junlin on this.  The user has to supply a mask for 
the date-time data as the second argument.  It seems to me that the function 
should be able to determine from that information whether double-precision is 
needed, whether single-precision will be adequate, and even when integer will 
suffice.

Stata is not entirely consistent in automatically detecting and setting the 
proper storage type.  For example, back on the earlier thread, typing 
-generate y = 83085733- won't set the data type to the necessary precision, but
opening the data editor and pasting 83085733 into the first cell and closing 
*does* set the data type to long.  

And, typing -generate float y = 1- and then -replace y = 83085733- won't 
automatically promote the data type to accommodate the larger value.  On the
other hand, first entering -generate byte y = 1- and then -replace y = 83085733-

does.

Joseph Coveney


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