I have encountered some strange things when going back and forth between versions of SPSS that support long variable names and versions that don't. As I recall, the situtation went a little like this. We created a data file in SPSS 11.5 that had short variable names. Someone else opened it in SPSS 12.0 and renamed the short variable names to long variable names that were completely different. When the file was opened in SPSS 11.5 the variables did not appear to be renamed.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ben Pfaff Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2005 6:29 PM To: John Darrington Cc: [email protected] Subject: Long-name/short-name complexity 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. (The immediate problem that I'm encountering is that dict_rename_var() doesn't update both short and long names, but that is in my opinion only a symptom of the increased complexity.) I am willing to write and test this change. I think it should go into 0.4.0, unless you have some serious objections. Ben -- "Welcome to the Slippery Slope. Here is your handbasket. Say, can you work 70 hours this week?" --Ron Mansolino _______________________________________________ pspp-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev _______________________________________________ pspp-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev
