Re: help with syntax

[Ben Pfaff]

"Michel Boaventura" <address@hidden> writes:

> I'got a base on PSPP which has only three columns: id, gender and
> height.
> I need to, for each male, to find the female who has the closest
> height of this male.
>
>
> On a pseudocode, it would be very easy (it is not optimized at all):
>
>
> for (i=0;i<numcases;i++) {
>     if (bank[i][gender] = 1) break;//only do it for males
>     delta = 1;
>     for (j=0;j<numcases;j++) {
>         if (bank[i][gender] = 0) break;//only compare with females
>         tmp = abs(bank[i]['height'] - bank[j]['height']);
>         if (tmp < delta) {
>             delta = tmp;
>             bank[i]['match'] = bank[j]['id];
>         }
>     }
> }
>
>
> How do I do it on PSPP? I've searched on the docs, but coudn't find a
> loop structure or
> something similar to it, since I need to walk on all the cases twice.

Hi Michel.

It looks to me like you never got an answer to this question.  I
don't have a good answer, either; this kind of problem is
difficult in PSPP or in SPSS.

Did you try asking your question on the SPSS newsgroup or the
spssx mailing list?  Those are good resources too.

Ben
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
http://benpfaff.org