Re: Long-name/short-name complexity

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 08:23:44PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:


             1. I doubt SPSS does anything similar.  Have you tested
                it?  (I have not.)  I suspect that you would get
                similar behavior to the above using SPSS.

No I've not tested it to see what SPSS does in this situation.  Maybe
I'll try it this week if I get a chance.
     
             2. It would only matter for transferring files between
                new versions of PSPP and old versions of SPSS.  Old
                versions of PSPP will reject files with long names, I
                believe; new versions of PSPP and new versions of SPSS
                understand long names.

I'd have to think about it carefully, before making any definitive
comments, but my feeling is that it's possible that (if SPSS doesn't
behave the way I'm suggesting) then certain syntax scripts which do a
lot of writing and re-reading of system files, could behave
differently under PSPP to SPSS.
     
             3. It will increase complexity.

True.
     
     I'd prefer to retain compatibility, especially where it actually
     simplifies our code, hence the preference not to retain name
     mappings.
     
     Comments?

Maybe we should find out exactly what SPSS does.
     
     Oh, one more thing--do you have an idea of how SPSS does short
     name mappings?  The SPSS 12.0 manual suggests it uses a base-10
     suffix with a underscore separator.  The "pseudo base-27" idea is
     cute but if possible I'd rather be compatible.

SPSS definitely does the "quasi base 27" thing (at least the copy I
have access to does).  Base 10 or "real" base 27 would have been
simpler, but I spent the extra effort emulating what SPSS does.  What
exactly in the SPSS manual leads you to believe it does base 10 ?

J'


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