Re: Mathematician/ C programmer would like to contribute

[John Darrington]

Hi Jochen,

Thanks for you mail.  I'm copying this reply to address@hidden so that
other developers get the benefit of the discussion.

There are a number of statistical procedures still missing.  You might 
like to consider the posthoc tests for the ONEWAY command, or oblique 
rotations for FACTOR.

We've never actually had any complaints about PSPP being numerically
unstable. That said, we could always use advice about what could be
done better.  For example, it is well know that variance is much more
stable when calculated with 2 passes though the data than with one.
However in PSPP we prefer to make as few passes as possible.  So any
advice from an expert on when and where the two pass method should
be prefered is welcome.

So far as coding standards are concerned,  these are available 
online at http://gnu.org/prep/standards/

Please feel free to post a message to address@hidden or drop
by at #pspp on irc.freenode.net

Regards,


John


On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 11:38:37AM +0100, Jochen M??ller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am a young mathematician currently engaged in PhD studies in numerical 
> analysis and would like to contribute to the PSPP project to gather 
> experience. I am totally new to open source projects so I don't know 
> where to start...
>
> Have you got suggestions what I could do, maybe implementation of a  
> special statistical procedure that is still missing? On the old project  
> homepage you asked for help by a numerical analyst to check possibly  
> unstable/unsafe algorithms, is this still a current problem? Are there  
> coding guidelines so that my code will fit in without much changes?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jochen

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