PSPP News

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NOTE: This page only covers the released versions of PSPP It doesn't cover the development versions. Check the changelog of the development versions at: http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/pspp/pspp/ChangeLog

PSPP NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
Time-stamp: <2005-07-24 20:23:41 blp> (Converted to HTML and starting note added by Patrick Brunier)
Copyright (C) 1996-9, 2000, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end for copying conditions.

Please email PSPP bug reports to bug-gnu-pspp at gnu dot org

Changes from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0:

Changes in build dependencies:

• The GNU Scientific Library (libgsl), version 1.6 or later, is now required.
• libplot from GNU plotutils is optional. Without it, the new graphing features will not work. If you do not have it installed, you must run `configure' with --without-libplot.
• libgmp2 is no longer a dependency.

Newly implemented commands and statistical features:

• EXAMINE, including its graphing features.
• FREQUENCIES now supports percentiles.
• ONEWAY.
• PERMISSIONS.
• SHOW.
• SORT CASES now sorts stably, that is, two cases with equal sort criteria will be in the same relative order before and after the sort.
• T-TEST (re-written).
• DATE and USE. These commands are parsed but otherwise ignored, to enhance compatibility with certain command files that invoke them unnecessarily.
• VARIABLE WIDTH, VARIABLE ALIGNMENT, and VARIABLE LEVEL. These currently have no effect on PSPP output, but their values are written to and read from system files and thus may affect third-party software.
• SET EPOCH implemented.
• DATA LIST FREE and DATA LIST LIST now support arbitrary field delimiters.
• FILE HANDLE now supports custom tab widths.

Long variable names (and other identifiers) are now supported. Up to the first 64 bytes of each identifier is significant. PSPP now reads and writes system files compatible with SPSS version 12.

New --algorithm and --syntax command line options allow SPSS-compatible or enhanced modes to be selected.

Support for transformation expressions has been rewritten and significantly improved. Refer to the manual for details.

Calculation of moments (mean, standard deviation, kurtosis, skewness) has been rewritten and should now be more accurate. In --algorithm=enhanced mode moments may be more accurate than SPSS in some cases.

Numerous bugs have been fixed, too many to mention here. Many new tests have been added, leading to the discovery and fixing of many of these bugs.

The ASCII output driver can now squeeze multiple blank lines into single blank lines.

Much of the code has been rewritten and refactored. It is now much cleaner.

The FILE TYPE and REPEATING DATA commands have been disabled for this release because their implementations were deemed too buggy to be useful. They will be fixed and replaced in a future release.

New pspp-mode for Emacs (in pspp-mode.el).

Added rudimentary command-line completion for interactive input.

lib/julcal and lib/dcdflib are no longer used, so they have been removed.

For developers, the build system now requires Autoconf 2.58 and Automake 1.7. The included gettext has been updated to version 0.12.1.

Some reports state that Texinfo 4.8, the latest version, may be necessary to successfully format the documentation on some systems.

Version 0.3.0 changes since 0.2.3:

Bugs fixed:

• Using alphanumeric variables in functions under AGGREGATE segfaulted. Fixed.
• Under certain circumstances, the final case would be omitted from the results of an AGGREGATE operation. Fixed.
• Undefined behavior was invoked by referencing a freed pointer under certain circumstances. Fixed.
• A wrong record size was displayed when paging the active file to disk. Fixed.
• Not having enough temporary space for sorting caused a core dump. Fixed.
• Syntax errors in function descriptions on AGGREGATE caused core dumps. Fixed.
• A null pointer was dereferenced, causing a core dump, when PERCENTILES was specified on FREQUENCIES. This fixes the problem, but PSPP still doesn't calculate percentiles.
• SORT always sorted in ascending order. Fixed.
• Some minor memory leaks in the expression parser were removed.
• Many assertions fixed for strict ANSI C compliance.

New features:

• SET ECHO ON now implemented, but turned off by default.
• PRINT specifier supported on END REPEAT.

Other:

• System libgmp2 library is used if installed instead of unconditionally using the included libgmp2 subset.
• Extensive code cleanup, which continues.
• Added CORRELATIONS command parser, but not implemented.

Version 0.2.3 changes since 0.2.2:

Bugs fixed:

• SPLIT FILE with a string variable caused a core dump. Fixed.
• Nested INCLUDEs didn't work. Fixed.
• The MATCH FILES procedure set the values of variables not present to 0. It should have been SYSMIS. This is now fixed.
• The REMARK command was too aggressive about skipping lines. It didn't like being the last command in a file.
• Comment parsing wasn't consistent with the rest of the code in its idea of where one command ends and another starts. This meant that sometimes commands would be mysteriously ignored. Thanks to Dr. Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• The TABLE subcommand on MATCH FILES worked only erratically at best. This fixes it. Thanks to Dr. Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• VARIABLE LABELS rejected a slash before the first variable specification, contradicting the documentation. Thanks to Walter M. Gray graywm@northernc.on.ca for reporting this bug.
• Because of an incorrect optimization in memory allocation, CROSSTABS sometimes segfaulted when asked to output multiple tables. Thanks to Walter M. Gray graywm@northernc.on.ca for reporting this bug.
• CROSSTABS didn't display value labels for column and row variables. Thanks to Walter M. Gray graywm@northernc.on.ca for reporting this bug.
• WRITE didn't write line ends. Fixed. Thanks to Dr. Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• The TABLE subcommand on MATCH FILES worked only erratically at best. This fixes it. Thanks to Dr. Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• VARIABLE LABELS rejected a slash before the first variable specification, contradicting the documentation. Thanks to Walter M. Gray graywm@northernc.on.ca for reporting this bug.
• Because of an incorrect optimization in memory allocation, CROSSTABS sometimes segfaulted when asked to output multiple tables. Thanks to Walter M. Gray graywm@northernc.on.ca for reporting this bug.
• CROSSTABS didn't display value labels for column and row variables. Thanks to Walter M. Gray graywm@northernc.on.ca for reporting this bug.
• WRITE didn't write line ends. Fixed. Thanks to Dr. Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• MATCH FILES corrupted memory and dumped core on some syntax errors. Fixed.
• MATCH FILES should set numeric values not available to the system-missing value, not to 0. Thanks to Dr. Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• KEEP didn't work properly on the SAVE procedure. Fixed. Thanks to Ralf Geschke ralf@kuerbis.org for reporting this bug.
• Memory leak fix.
• Some systems didn't like the way open_file was coded. Thanks to Hankin hankin@rogue.consultco.com for pointing this out.
• The SAVE procedure didn't save long string variables properly. Fixed by this patch. Thanks to Hankin hankin@rogue.consultco.com for this patch.
• Minor documentation fixes for MATCH FILES.

Version 0.2.2 changes since 0.2.1:

Bugs fixed:

• Fix behavior of PRINT SPACE for negative arguments.
• Fix reading some unusual system files.
• Fix LIST problems with very long variables. Thanks to Hankin hankin@dunno.comfor this bug report.
• Fix problems with some string format specifiers.
• Fix use of $CASENUM in expressions. Thanks to Dirk Melcher BZN-mdksh@t-online.de for reporting this bug.
• Additional DATA LIST FREE and DATA LIST LIST fixes. Thanks to Hankin hankin@dunno.com again on this one.
• Sometimes you may encounter a PSPP script that has to be interpreted in interactive mode. Now you can use the -i flag to do this.
• Warnings for egcs 1.1.1 cleaned up. (However you'll get lots of `unused variable' warnings under gcc 2.7.2.3, fixing this will take more effort.)
• Tests fixed.
• The files in gmp need the internationalization directory in their include path. Thanks to OKUJI Yoshinori okuji@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp for pointing this out.

Version 0.2.1 changes since 0.2.0:

Bugs fixed:

• Remember to include examples/ directory in distribution :-)
• Fixed gmp compile problems for some non-i386 architectures. Thanks to Hans Olav Eggestad olav@jordforsk.nlh.no and others for reporting this.
• DATA LIST FREE and DATA LIST LIST parsing of input files is now matches the documented behavior exactly, and error messages are more helpful. Thanks to Mark H. Wood mwood@IUPUI.Edu.

Version 0.2.0 changes since 0.1.0:

Procedures now implemented:

• CROSSTABS. Please see documentation for caveats.

Transformations and utilities now implemented:

• AGGREGATE
• APPLY DICTIONARY
• CLEAR TRANSFORMATIONS
• DISPLAY (all subcommands).
• ERASE
• FLIP
• EXPORT
• HOST
• IMPORT
• MATCH FILES
• MATRIX DATA
• NEW FILE
• REPEATING DATA

Support for input and output through pipes:
"|command" and "command|" filenames; support for special filenames "-", "stdin", "stdout", "stderr".

New command-line features:

• New option --testing-mode: Invoke heuristics to assist testing.
• New option --safer, -s: Don't allow certain unsafe operations.
• New option --command=CMD, -c CMD: Perform literal command CMD.
• rc file ~/.pspp/rc is executed before any other files.
• Now multiple syntax files can be specified.

Operator LAG is now implemented.

Added missing FILE subcommand to REREAD.

Table output manager completely rewritten.

Device configuration file syntax changed. You will need to reinstall your `devices' file.

New output driver for HTML.

PostScript driver and prologue simplified.

Many bugs fixed. General source-code cleanup.

Added Texinfo documentation for:

• PSPP system file format
• PSPP portable file format
• How to write input for q2c parser generator
• HTML driver

PSPP language is now fully documented. Please report any inaccuracies or omissions in the documentation.

Changes for version 0.1.0:

First public release. For changes from unreleased development versions, please see ONEWS.

Copyright information:

Copyright (C) 1996-9, 2000, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.

Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.

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