[task #5698] First draft of CONTRIBUTING file

[Jason H Stover]

Follow-up Comment #4, task #5698 (project pspp):

> > "The program must be written in C or Fortran"                            
                                   
> >                                                                          
                                   
> > I don't think that this requirement is necessary. A lot of people are    
                                   
> using                                                                      
                                   
> > Octave/Matlab for statistical/neural net work these days. We could       
                                   
> probably                                                                   
                                   
> > understand what's going on in most languages.                            
                                   
>                                                                            
                                   
> But I don't think Jason *wants* to translate or rewrite completely the     
                                   
> contributor's code.  I think he wants them to contribute working code in C,
                                   
> to which Jason adds some additional code that makes it work in PSPP.       
                                   

Yes.
                                                                             
                                   
Because of these two comments, I'd like to ask some questions about "which
language."                                                                   
                            
                                                                             
                                   
John, did you mean that if we accept a contribution in, say, GNU             
                                   
Octave, that putting it PSPP would require us to translate it into C? (That's
what I thought you meant, but I just 
want to be sure.)                                                   
                                                                             
                                   
I thought we would want the language of the accepted program to be, if not C,
something that gcc will compile. Right?                                       
                                       
                                                                             
                                   
If we say, "Give us code that we do not have to translate into C," what
languages should we accept? The GNU coding standards say to use C, but what
about Fortran? A lot of statisticians program in Fortran, and we could
compile Fortran, so should we accept that, too?                              
                      


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