On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 06:29:06PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
Hi John. In working on the MATCH FILES command I incidentally
ran into the new code for handling long variable names. It seems
needlessly complex to me to maintain both a long name and a short
name for each variable. Is there a good reason to do so? I
don't see any evidence in the Syntax Reference Guide for SPSS
12.0 that SPSS keeps anything similar around.
I would prefer to keep a single `name' member, which would be of
flexible length and retain the original capitalization, and then
where necessary (e.g. for SAVE and EXPORT) devise an equivalent
8-character name.
I entirely agree. The short name has to exist only when writing
sysfiles/portable files. Its scope can be limited to
the routines for doing that. However, I think it will be necessary to
keep the mapping from long to short names in static memory somewhere
otherwise the mapping could change unexpectedly. Consider the
following scenario:
* foo.sav contains a variable called ABCDEFGHIJ (short name ABCDEF_1)
GET /FILE='foo.sav'.
AGGREGATE /OUTFILE=* /ABCDEFGHI=MAX(ABCDEFGHIJ).
SAVE /OUTFILE='foo.sav'.
* foo.sav now contains 2 variables:
* ABCDEFGHI (short name ABCDEF_1)
* ABCDEFGHIJ (short name ABCDEF_2)
I am willing to write and test this change. I think it should go
into 0.4.0, unless you have some serious objections.
No objections from me.
You'll have to change var_to_string so that it returns the long name,
which will affect *all* the tests ......
J'
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