On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 12:44 PM John Darrington <j...@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote: > > On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 11:00:44AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote: > > Yes, I agree. Classic SPSS isn't general purpose enough to write > statistical procedures > that are as easy to use as the ones built into it. The SPSS language > manages to > be a misery of inconsistencies that make it near impossible to > generalize. > The macro language (which I'm currently implementing), which appears to > be > meant for extensions, is terrible. > > Maybe we will eventually be able to implement the Python extensions to > SPSS. > Those are the most fruitful direction I've seen toward making SPSS > programmable > in a reasonably friendly way. > > Some years ago I wrote an experimental scheme interface which seemed to work > quite well. > Perhaps I'll dig it up again some time. The biggest complication as I > remember was > dealing with missing values. They always complicate matters in unexpected > ways.
Scheme (Guile) is unlikely to be as useful as Python to our users, since I imagine that some of them already have Python programs for SPSS.
