Well I've done some more work to make the GUI a bit more tolerant to bad input. I think most scenarios should now write valid SAV files.
The only problem I found was writing string variables which have a width
larger than 8. I'm not sure what the problem is here.
Anyway, I'm going to have to catch up on my daytime work now ....
Regarding your earlier comments about the general direction of Psppire,
here are the phases of development I envisage:
Phase 1: The outcome of this phase is a tool which can be used to
edit/browse/view/read/write *small* system files.
Such a tool might alone be enough to encourage some users to
try PSPP --- the most frightening spss syntax is the DATA LIST
commands.
Phase 2: I said "small" in the above paragraph, because there'll be no
use of casefiles. All cases are explicitly stored in the data
sheet. Phase 2 will integrate our casefile object into Psppire,
which will make handling of really big data sets manageable. And
it'll open the way for the next phase ....
Phase 3: Add the ability perform transformations on the data (eg. SORT,
AGGREGATE etc). I suggest the best way to do this is to have
the GUI generate a syntax string eg "SORT CASES BY /x" and pass
this request to an external daemon, similar to the way Ben
suggested earlier. The exact details of this protocol will have
to be worked out --- eg it'll be necessary to specify a socket
or pipe to stream the casefile from the gui to the backend, and
vice-versa.
Phase 4: Add procedures (eg EXAMINE, T-TEST, REGRESSION). This will
work much the same way as Phase 3. The new issue will be how to
display the output. One way will be to use our existing output
mechanism and to add a GDK driver to it. This will however will
not allow for interaction with the "Pivot Tables" the way that
spss does. Other options exist, which I've not really thought
about much, and it's probably more in Ben's area of expertise.
I'm not going to be so foolish as to even try to put a time frame on
this.
Comments?
J'
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