Stat Computing > Limdep > FAQ

How to Switch between LimDep for Windows and MainFrame

Sometimes, you may need to switch between LimDep for Windows and LimDep for mainframe version. There are two issues here, the data file and the program file. Since it is crossing two operating systems, a LimDep for Window file can not migrate to mainframe directly or visa versa. Notice that Stat/Transfer  only handles LimDep for Windows. Therefore, it is not possible to switch between the two versions of LimDep if you want to use Stat/Transfer for that purpose. The most straightforward way is to have your data file as a raw data file, such as a comma delimited text file. The good thing is that the program file which contains all of the commands that you want to issue to your file,  will be the same (for most of the part.) Then you can use the same syntax to read your data for both versions. For example, we have an ASCII file called hsb2.csv. It is comma-separated and has 200 observations with 11 variables. The following syntax will work for either LimDep for Windows or LimDep for mainframe.   

Read; Nobs=200; Nvar=11;
Names=id, female, race, ses, schtype, prog,
read, write, math, science, socst;
file=hsb2.csv$

Let's say we have saved the command to a text file called hsb2.cm (the extension does not matter). Then in LimDep for Windows, you can open this file to a command window and highlight it and run it. On mainframe machine, using the interactive version of LimDep, you can issue the command below to read the data in. 

 open; input=hsb2.cm$

In the same manner, if you have done some analysis with LimDep in either version, you can copy and paste the command to a text file and rerun it sometime later in other version. In other words, we can have a lot of more commands in our hsb2.cm rather than simply the read command itself. Here is a sample program file with more commands in it. You can try it on the sample data set on either version of Limdep.   

UCLA Researchers are invited to our Statistical Consulting Services
We recommend others to our list of Other Resources for Statistical Computing Help
These pages are Copyrighted (c) by UCLA Academic Technology Services