Thanks for your response, but I don’t know whether you have seen the user interface on the Mac installation I have:
Hopefully my screen clip will come through to you, but if not, what I see is a short list of drop-down menus (file,edit,view, data, transform, analyze, utilities, windows, help) and the transform drop down provides options for recoding, rescaling, modifying one variable, but no multiple variable, e.g. boolean, operations. There is no option as far as I have found to enter line commands of the sort you suggest, e.g. a COMPUTE statement.
It appears that this Mac version looks and behaves quite differently from the GNU/Linux version. My question then boils down to whether it is possible in the version I have in front of me to enter commands like the COMPUTE statement.
1. Am I missing something in this version, some hidden point of access to a command line?
2. Is there another Mac version than this than does indeed look and work like the standard Linux version?
I hope I am making myself clear and that the screen shot is visible.
Again, thanks for whatever further thoughts you or the community might have.
Cheers,
Mark
On Mar 7, 2014, at 2:05 AM, John Darrington <address@hidden> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 09:19:09PM -0500, Mark Levine wrote:
I have had no problem with individual variable recoding. I would, however, like to do a variable transformation of the form (If VARX = 1 and VARY =1, then let NEWVAR = 1), i.e. a simple boolean _expression_.
There are a number of ways this could be achived (for example you could use
RECODE ... INTO ) but in my opinion, the simplest way is:
COMPUTE newvar = (VARX = 1) AND (VARY=1).
I have done this in SPSS years ago and can see how it would be done on the line entry version of PSPP, but is this sort of transformation possible in the Mac/GUI environment? I accept that installing a LINUX OS, etc. would be an obvious solution but my software skills are marginal and that installation path seems daunting.
There should be no difference in behaviour between PSPP on the Mac and on other platforms. They should both behave identically.
Having said that, GNU and GNU/Linux are the systems that are recommended, and which have been tested
most thoroughly.
It's probably a discussion for another forum, but in my experience
modern GNU/Linux distributions are magnetudes less "daunting" than Windows and certainly
than the Mac ... less frustration, better for your sanity.
J'
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