Re: Macro Functionality

[Frans Houweling]

Hi all,
for me as spss user, living without DEFINE() is hard. You use it for 
declaring constants, but also to accomplish things otherwise impossible, 
mostly WRITEing DEFINEs and then INCLUDEing the resulting OUTFILE. But 
the macro syntax is absolutely horrible and I often end up in !QUOTEing 
hell.
I don't know much about Python scripting - I have always thought it was 
used for manipulating the spss output only - but if pspp could interact 
with scripts at runtime that would be great. And if that could give pspp 
some of the introspection spss lacks (like "does a variable named age 
exist?") I would love it!
frans


John Darrington wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:06:12PM -0500, Andrew Choens wrote:
>      On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 13:20 -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      > Andrew Choens <address@hidden> writes:
>      > 
>      > > I looked in the PSPP manual and can see that the DEFINE syntax is not
>      > > yet implemented. Is macro functionality something that is being worked
>      > > on or is it an area where manpower is a problem?
>      > 
>      > I have thought about implementing macros, but have not got around
>      > to it.  This is, I think, the first request we've had to
>      > implement them.  If you want, you can file a "wishlist" bug at
>      > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=pspp as a reminder.
>      
>      I will file a wishlist request. I'm trying to build some stub and banner
>      tables and thought it would be possible to write a macro to do this, but
>      it does not sound like that will be a possibility right now.
>
> From what I can infer from the spss community, the "macro"
> functionality is considered anachronistic.  For new code, they seem to
> recommend using the Python interface.  
>
> Which do you think should have higher priority for PSPP?
>
> J'
>
>
>   
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