Re: st: Re: insheet multi threading

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

I agree with Maarten to the extent that I don't think Argyn's case is
helped by wild exaggerations. In fact, I had exactly the same thought
as Maarten, that Argyn's assertion is refutable, a virtue naturally,
but quite wrong.

On the main issue, my short answer is that I don't know.

A longer answer is that -insheet- depends on parts of a datafile
having the same structure as the whole. So, very likely -- if this is
parallelisable -- much of the code would require lots of compatibility
checks to ensure consistency of input.

My guess is that -insheet- peeks at the top of the data file, makes a
guess at its structure, and then keeps on going unless and until it
finds a problem.

By the way, the presumption appears to be that you need Stata to
produce a Stata .dta file, which is not correct either.

Nick

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Schaffer, Mark E <M.E.Schaffer@hw.ac.uk> wrote:
> Well ... I took Argyn's statement to be a bit of poetic licence.  The unpoetic way of asking the question is: -insheet- and -infile- are commonly used commands (at least judging by how often they show up on Statalist in one way or another); can they be parallelised?  Seems like a reasonable and Statalist-worthy question.
>
> --Mark
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>> [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of
>> Maarten buis
>> Sent: 02 May 2011 16:06
>> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>> Subject: Re: st: Re: insheet multi threading
>>
>> --- Argyn Kuketayev wrote:
>> > I'm sure everyone does it daily: read CSV files.
>>
>> This is statement that is very easy to falsify: it only needs
>> one Stata user who does not do it daily. I am such a Stata
>> user: I use Stata often and I have been doing so for some
>> time, and over the last 8 years or so that I have used Stata
>> I can remember only three or four instances that I have read
>> a CSV file.
>>
>> I am not trying to be mean --- well, actually I am, but that
>> is not the point --- the point is that we often tend to
>> generalize our experience to the rest of the world.
>> Even in the very homogenous group of Stata users or the even
>> more homogenous group of statalist subscribers, that is
>> usually not the case. People use Stata in surprisingly
>> different ways, so what is very important to you can easily
>> be completely irrelevant to others. So I would be very
>> careful when making such statements and check with different
>> people from different disciplines and industries before
>> making such claims.
>> The easier alternative is to just not make such statements.
>>
>> -- Maarten
>>
>>
>> --------------------------
>> Maarten L. Buis
>> Institut fuer Soziologie
>> Universitaet Tuebingen
>> Wilhelmstrasse 36
>> 72074 Tuebingen
>> Germany
>>
>>
>> http://www.maartenbuis.nl
>> --------------------------
>>
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>
>
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