status report

[Ben Pfaff]

I'm still working on getting data-in.c and data-out.c just right.
It's much more complicated to exactly reproduce SPSS output
formats than I thought.  In particular, for F, COMMA, DOT,
DOLLAR, PCT, E, and the CC formats, I wrote a test that formats
about 350,000 different examples and ran it in both SPSS 13 and
PSPP.  At first, about 100,000 of them differed.  I've worked
diligently to make PSPP output more similar, and now I'm down to
about 55 that differ slightly.

That doesn't include differences that fall into the following
categories:

        * 2,979 cases that differ slightly due to numerical
          accuracy of formatting.  SPSS isn't very good at this;
          sometimes it will misformat relatively small integers
          that are exactly represented as floating point numbers.
          But other cases are not clear-cut.

        * 630 cases where SPSS will silently drop an initial 1
          that doesn't fit, e.g. 999.95 in F5.2 produces "000.0"
          instead of " 1000".

        * 84 cases where SPSS just makes me say "WTF?"  For
          example, do SET CCB='-,[[[,]]],-' and then format 9.5
          as CCB8.0 and you get "  *, 10 " instead of just 
          "     10 ".

        * Another 360 cases where SPSS makes me say "WTF?" for
          another reason.  For example, format -2 as E13.6 and you
          get "*************" instead of "-2.00000E+000".

        * 360 cases where SPSS drops a negative sign.  For
          example, output -999.95 in F6.2 and SPSS produces
          "1000.0" instead of " -1000".

In other words, it's amazing how buggy SPSS 13 is.  I wonder
whether these have been fixed in SPSS 15.

Oh, and I've rewritten the system file reader.  Much cleaner
now.  Still needs careful testing.

It'll probably be another week or two, at least, before I have
all of this cleaned up enough for review.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: address@hidden
web: http://benpfaff.org