On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 07:59:18AM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
Unless Selma expresses a preference, I think it would be fine to
offer your suggestions now.
OK, Well here they are:
Selma, you've obviously put a lot of effort into the program and clearly
you have a good understanding of the posix sockets API. Like you
said, doing this kind of job in a low level language can be a challange,
and like Ben, I wonder if it would not be better to leave the job of
fetching the NIST files to a program or library designed for the purpose.
There are all sorts of issues which could come up which can affect
downloading from an http server. For example I tried using your code
at work at lunchtime. It didn't work, because there, port 80 is closed
and instead all http requests go through a proxy server. Of course,
you could add code to examine the http_proxy environnment variable
and if set send a proxy request and handle the response. But what
about the case when the proxy has a password ? And what about SSL
connections? and redirects? Hell, you'll end up writing an entire web
browser!
I suggest that we assume for now, that the relevant NIST files have
been downloaded (we can worry about how later) and are present in a
particular directory. This will allow you to concentrate on creating
the .at files. and fixing those issues. One such issue which I
noticed. The NIST data presents its decimal results with leading
zeros, whereas PSPP does not (or vici-versa - I forget which). Thus,
there were some test failures simply because the test expects "0.1234"
whereas PSPP produces ".1234". There are a number of possible ways we
can address this. We just need to decide upon one of them.
Also, rather than generating the .at files themselves, I think it'll
be a lot easier to have static .at files which fetch the input data
and the expected results from other files. This will save a lot of
messing about with sewing parts of NIST into .at files. You will
still have to write a program to cut NIST files into the input data
set and the expected output respectively. But you will be able to
concentrate on this issue without having to worry about a lot of
side issues.
What do you think?
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