On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 11:42:11PM -0600, Ben Pfaff wrote:
So I thought about categories a little, and it seems to me that
we want something like this, which also indicates my proposed
syntax for operation.def. The first word after "category" is a
name for identifiers (which will probably go into an enum), the
quoted string is a name for the category, and the parenthesized
list gives the functions in the category (and accepts wildcards):
The only real difference is that we break down the statistical
functions into subcategories, and do so along two axes: by the
type of statistical function and by the distribution. The list
of categories could either be hierarchical with a colon in the
category name indicating the hierarchy, or it could just be a
flat list with any category name that contains a colon sorted
after any name that doesn't, seeing as the most common functions
will probably not be those in subcategories.
I haven't implemented this, just started thinking over
categories. If you like it, I could implement it. (The
expressions part, I mean; not the GUI part.)I've been thinking about this too, and I've got an idea which might give a more pleasing gui than that produced by the Chicago company: If we use the features of the GtkTreeView widget, then we can present a list of categories and allow the user to expand or collapse those categories in which (s)he's interested. It means that the dialog box doesn't have to be cluttered with more widgets, yet allows easy filtering and selection of the functions. Would it be possible to make an api which provides an iterator which can be used to return all the functions which belong to a given combination of catagories? It may be better to use bitfields instead of sequential enums. Having made that request, I don't consider it to be the most important thing for pspp right now, so I'm probably not going to get around to using such an api until I've got some time on my hands. 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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