Re: Count system missing columns

[John Darrington]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 03:53:58PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 04:42:24PM -0600, Alan Mead wrote:
     > On 12/21/2015 4:10 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     > > I think that you just want: COUNT n=ALL(SYSMIS). 
     > 
     > Brilliant!  But it doesn't wok.  On my datafiles, I get a long list of
     > errors like:  "V1 and V8 are not of the same type.  All variables in
     > this variable list must be of the same type. V8 will be omitted from the
     > list." (where, indeed, V1 and V8 are string variables of different 
lengths).
     > 
     > Finally, it complains that SYSMIS isn't a string and fails to execute
     > the COUNT: "error: COUNT: Syntax error at `missing': expecting string." 
     > This happens whether I use MISSING or SYSMIS. 
     > 
     > I thought that the above was a bug, and maybe it is, because I should be
     > able to use SYSMIS/MISSING but it works fine when I specify the columns
     > to use, so I think it only fails when I specify ALL as the columns.
     > 
     > BTW, it would be neat if this worked in PSPP, but SPSS refuses to accept
     > ALL as a column range.
     
     Hmm.
     
     We could make COUNT accept this, or at least give better error
     messages.  But it still won't work any better with SPSS.
     
     In the end, the SPSS language isn't very good at this kind of thing.
     
My first idea to work around this was to use RECODE.  But it seems that
RECODE also cannot deal with heterogenous variable types.
I think it would be good to have a wishlist item to allow COUNT and RECODE
to do that.

J'

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