I've started looking at the NPAR TEST command. It has a lot of subcommands, most of which are unrelated (IMHO they should all be seperate commands), so I'll probably implement them one at a time and check them in as and when they're complete.
1. I'm intending to put in more effort (compared to other commands I've implemented) to seperate the parsing of the command from its execution. My idea is that the parser should produce some kind of abstract base class, implementations of which can then be executed by the "backend". I'm hopefull that this idea, if successful, could then be extended for all commands. 2. In the NPAR command, spss has /SAMPLE and /METHOD subcommands, which, if used, make the command do monte-carlo sampling of the dataset rather than iteration. So far as I can tell, this is a hack, to avoid memory exhaustion. PSPP's casefiles should entirely avoid this problem (unless disk space is also exhausted), so I'm proposing that PSPP just accepts and ignores these subcommands ... unless anyone can give me a good reason to do otherwise. 3. I've been thinking about various optimisations which NPAR can make. One significant optimisation can only be used if multiple tests are asked for and if /MISSING LISTWISE INCLUDE is specified, which can avoid extra sorting. However, my guess is that few if any users will use that particular combination, so I'm thinking that this optimisation is probably not worth the effort. Comments? 4. Many of the output tables make a lot of use of subscripted footnotes. I wonder how much effort it would take to implement such a feature, as a stop-gap measure until we get a new output subsystem? 5. I'm becoming aware, that different developers, and indeed the same developers at different times, are making inconsistent use of style in output tables, with regards to eg: text alignment, double vs. single lines, bold fonts, output precision etc. Perhaps we need a "manual of style" to make some recommendations here. J' -- PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285 A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3 See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key.
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