[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > On Apr 13, 11:31 pm, Ben Pfaff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> "Robert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> > What about these DAP and PSPP projects? Are they fairly mature and >> > ready to use yet? >> >> I don't know whether I'd call PSPP mature, but we're actively >> working on making it better all the time. Your suggestions and >> bug reports are welcomed.
> At the moment, I'm looking for work and living in a rented room. > But when I get my own apartment ( hence my own home office), I'll > download your product, your user's manual, and kick the tires. > (i'm actually at an apple store now). Because I do want to see how far > along > your product is. When you do get the chance, I'd recommend trying the most snapshot on ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp instead of the most recent released version (0.4.0). The snapshot is (likely) better quality and (definitely) has more features. > I'm looking in your tarball for test programs(programs written in > the , uh, PSPP > programming language, with corresponding printout files, to see that > the product was tested for that > example and any bugs that popped up were resolved). We don't provide many examples, but we do have a large number of tests (137 in my working tree here). We try to support the same language as SPSS; thus, you can use any SPSS code you find online, as long as the features that it uses are among those supported by PSPP. We would like to provide more examples. If you do happen to develop any nice examples of PSPP use, then I'd happily accept contributions of them into the PSPP tarball. > I'm a little confused by what I see, though. Some files seem to have > some sample "SPSS" code, but mixed in with code > in a very different syntax, and maybe the printout is in the same > file(!), at the bottom of the file. I think that you are probably looking at the tests. These are primarily written as Bourne shell scripts. As you say, many of them consist of a PSPP program followed by a set of expected output to compare against the actual output. Thus, if anything changes in the output, we know that a bug has been introduced. > Now SPSS and PSPP are recursive, right? So you can have an assignment > statement, inside a while-loop, inside an if-else statement, etc. , > like > you could do with any procedural language? Well, to some extent, yes. Some constructs--notably, statistical procedures--can only occur at the top level. And the semantics of PSPP and SPSS are somewhat unusual, in that all the statements (called, in PSPP and SPSS, "transformations") are within an implicit loop over all the cases in the current data file (the "active file"). > Also, I notice, looking at your Usenet postings, you never ever > mention PSPP. Why? It's rarely on-topic in the newsgroups I post in, it is rarely relevant to the questions that folks discuss in those newsgroups, and, finally, I'm not fond of tooting my own horn. Hope this helps. P.S. If you have more interest in PSPP, then you may want to join the discussion in our users or developers lists, for which you can find information at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users You can send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] directly, but if you don't join them first you'll have to wait for someone to approve your first post, which can take a day or so. -- "I don't want to learn the constitution and the declaration of independence (marvelous poetry though it be) by heart, and worship the flag and believe that there is a god and the dollar is its prophet." --Maarten Wiltink in the Monastery _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
