I agree with the approach of Annenmieke van Middelkoop about 'invalid' records after "Read".

Bernard Branger, Nantes, France

__________________________________________________________________________

I have several concerns about this approach. 1. Most important, records with 'invalid' dates are excluded from analysis (10 in this example). The fact that the 'invalid' dates are likely to be incorrect is no reason to not be able to analyse the records. 2. READing a large dataset with many dates can be a very slow process. 3. The output given by Analysis (as shown above) is not very useful. Neither record numbers nor variable names are identified.

I would like to suggest: a. That dates are not checked at all during the READ process. The analyst can look for incorrect dates in Analysis, relevant to the content of the data. OR b. That the user can specify whether to check the dates or not on READing a dataset. OR c. That, if neither a. nor b. is an option, more detail about the 'invalid' dates (record number, variable name) is provided so that they can be edited.

Annemieke van Middelkoop Pretoria, South Africa

------------------------------

________________________________________ EpiData-list@lists.umanitoba.ca http://lists.umanitoba.ca/mailman/listinfo/epidata-list

End of EpiData-list Digest, Vol 41, Issue 2 *******************************************