Re: Long-name/short-name complexity

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:45:10PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:

     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > Maybe we should find out exactly what SPSS does.
     
     I think that's the thing to do.  I will try to test it out in the
     next few days.  If you get to it before me, pass along your
     results, and I will do the same.
     
My results are in the brief report attached.  

My conclusion is that SPSS does indeed keep its long-short name map,
and does not allow short names to magically change.  So I think we
should do the same.  I don't think it adds too much extra complexity.
Variables need only to have one name (the long one).  The map needs to
be a member of the dictionary. The only modules which will need to use
it however will be sfm-read and sfm-write.

I suppose the question still remains about what should happen if the
variables are renamed.  Tom Watson's comments seem to suggest that
SPSS simply ignores the short names and renames only the long ones.
We can probably do better than this.

Another question is the geometry of the long-short name map --- should
it be indexed by shortname or by longname.  I remember wondering if I
made the right choice when I was implementing it.
 

Any comments?


J'

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report.txt
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