Re: Should I use PSPP or R?

[John Darrington]

To answer your original question, if you've  never used a stats
package before, then I would suggest that you start with R.  Most
users are of the opinion that R is more powerful but harder to learn.

The primary motivation to develop PSPP (for me anyway) was to benefit
those people who have been using SPSS for decades and would like to
switch to Free Software but can't, or don't want to, learn a new system.

There are also other benefits of PSPP over R, including:

* Possibly faster.
* Copyright is held by one party only.
* (in the future) integration with desktop software.

An R module to read PSPP syntax might be a good idea, and the PSPP
code is now mature enough that it may be possible (if there's any
interested  R developers out there, then talk to us).  But parsing the
syntax and interpreting it is not trivial.  The effort involved in
writing such a module from scratch, I suggest would be similar to
writing PSPP all over again.

J'

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