Mike Fleming has brought together a series of presentations at the Washington Statistical Society. The theme has been public-domain software, including our usual friends in statistics and Linux like R (S+ clone), octave (Mathlab clone), LaTeX. Beyond the packages many of us have heard of, this week James J. Filliben of the Statistical Engineering Division of the U.S. National Institute of Standards (NIST) presented software continually developed since they first introduced it in 1978 (yes, that's 20 years). That software is "DATAPLOT".
Three people work on dataplot full time at NIST. They have 1 million lines of code in the program, 17 MB of binaries, and 2000 pages of documentation. They have 70 statistical distributions, probably more than the statistical bastions SAS, SPSS and BMDP. They contain most every experimental design in Box and Jenkins. Their software does Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), time series analysis, process control, reliability. Their front end is Tcl/Tk and they have extensive graphics. This program is very popular at NIST. Why haven't we heard of dataplot? NIST didn't want government software competing with commercial software. Of course, the bastion SAS was developed under extensive funding by federal and state governments until someone carted off with it. Indeed, Robert Morrison at Oklahoma State University still has the 72,000 IBM cards for SAS. While James Filliben has Unix and Linux versions of dataplot, he learned this week about RedHat and Debian. Mike Flemming tells me that the dataplot team is now interested in having a debian version. Mike has tried to use the Linux version of dataplot and says he has difficulty with some libraries on Linux but can run dataplot on a Sun, so forming a debian package may take a little work. I will give Mike Flemming the address of the Prospective-Packages maintainer, [EMAIL PROTECTED], which Mike will forward to James Filliben, [EMAIL PROTECTED] dataplot has the web page http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/software/dataplot.html Oh, yes, it is "free, public-domain" with some U.S. Government copyright. NIST has produced a product which best suits its purposes and probably does not want to use another product, unlike the massive geographical program "Grass" developed over decades by another US government agency. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .