Dear all, A few weeks ago, I asked this list why small Stata files became huge R files. Thomas Lumley said it was because "Stata uses single-precision floating point by default and can use 1-byte and 2-byte integers. R uses double precision floating point and four-byte integers." And it seemed I couldn't do anythig about it.
Is it true? I mean, isn't there a (more or less simple) way to change how R stores data (maybe by changing the source code and compiling it)? The reason why I insist in this point is because I am trying to work with a data frame with more than 820.000 observations and 80 variables. The Stata file has 150Mb. With my Pentiun IV 2GHz and 1G RAM, Windows XP, I could't do the import using the read.dta() function from package foreign. With Stat Transfer I managed to convert the Stata file to a S file of 350Mb, but my machine still didn't manage to import it using read.S(). I even tried to "increase" my memory by memory.limit(4000), but it still didn't work. Regardless of the answer to my question, I'd appreciate to hear about your experience/suggestions in working with big files in R. Thank you for youR-Help, Dimitri Szerman ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
