Re: pspp setup

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 09:05:39AM -0000, Scott Bryan wrote:

     As a life long user of SPSS, I can say that PSPP works in a pinch, but
     the promise is quickly let down by all the things that it doesn't do.
     
     I like to use nonparametric stats - no dice.

It's not quite true to say pspp doesn't do any non-parametric
statistics.  It currently does binomial, chi-square and wilcoxon
signed rank tests.  But we certainly need to support more.

     I like to do correlations - again, no dice (it should do this, but my
     version just crashes)

This will be fixed in the next release.

     I like to have output directed to files - sort of, but rather
     tricky

Output is directed to a file by default.  It's true that it's not
simple to change the name of the default output file, but copying a
file from one place to another is hardly "tricky".
     
     There are also compatibility issues with SPSS. You can't just go from
     system to system.

PSPP is intended to be compatible with SPSS and it's been tested on
many different systems.  What problems have you experienced?

     I believe that there are different versions out there, none as far as I
     can tell work reliably across a range of stats.

I don't understand this sentence.  Are you saying that PSPP makes
numerical errors under certain circumstances?  If so, please file a
bug report.  PSPP comes with a fairly extensive suite of tests, so any
errors that get reported will be fixed and will stay fixed.

The mailing address for bug reports is address@hidden  If you
want to help improve PSPP, the developers will welcome  your
contributions.

J'

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