PSPP FAQ

• What is PSPP?
• What can PSPP do?
• What are the goals for PSPP?
• What do I need to run PSPP?
• Where can I get PSPP?
• How do I install PSPP?
• How do I start using PSPP?
• What documentation is available?
• How can I get more information on PSPP?
• Does PSPP have it's own IRC channel?
• PSPP lacks this feature which I really need. How can I get PSPP to support it?
• Can I help out with PSPP development?
• What does PSPP stand for?
• I'm having troubles while building release 0.4.0. What to do?

What is PSPP?

PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It interprets commands in the SPSS language and produces tabular output in ASCII, PostScript, or HTML format.

One goal of the PSPP project is compatibility with the SPSS language. It also aims to be better written. Right now it features:

• High-quality output formatting:
  • Presentation-quality tables on devices that can handle it, such as laser printers and raster displays. This is currently implemented through a PostScript driver. A simple HTML tables driver is also available.
  • Other devices, such as terminals and dot-matrix printers, are supported through an ASCII driver. IBM PC box-drawing characters can also be used. Bold and italics are supported if the underlying device supports them.
  • Output can be directed to multiple devices at once, for instance to a dot-matrix printer and a PostScript printer, and retain the unique output properties of each device.
  • All this can be done on any operating system that PSPP supports. Though the latest versions of what PSPP replaces support similar functionality, they do so only under non-free Microsoft operating systems.
• Portability: PSPP is easy to port. It should be simple to port it to any POSIX.1 compliant operating system having an ANSI C compiler.

What can PSPP do?

Quite a lot or not very much, depending on how you look at it. PSPP supports most transformations and utilities. But it only supports a few statistical analysis procedures. This major lack will be addressed in future versions.

Refer to the manual for the complete list of supported commands.

What are the goals for PSPP?

The long term goals for PSPP are ambitious. We wish to provide the following support to users:

• All of the SPSS transformation language. PSPP already supports a large subset of it.
• All the statistical procedures that someone is willing to implement, whether they exist in SPSS or not. Currently, statistical support is limited, but growing.
• Compatibility with SPSS syntax, including compatibility with known bugs and warts, where it makes sense. We also provide an "enhanced" mode in certain cases where PSPP can output better results that may surprise SPSS users.
• Friendly textual and graphical interfaces. PSPP does not do a good job of this yet.
• Attractive output, including graphs, in a variety of human- and machine-readable formats. PSPP currently produces output in ASCII, PostScript, and HTML formats. We will enhance PSPP's output formatting in the future.
• Good documentation. Currently the PSPP manual describes its language completely, but we would like to add information on how to select statistical procedures and interpret their results.
• Efficient support for very large data sets. For procedures where it is practical, we wish to efficiently support data sets many times larger than physical memory. The framework for this feature is already in place, but it has not been tuned or extensively tested.

Over the long term, we also wish to provide support to developers who wish to extend PSPP with new statistical procedures, by supplying the following:

• Easy-to-use support for parsing language syntax. Currently, parsing is done by writing "recursive descent" code by hand, with some support for automated parsing of the most common constructs. We wish to improve the situation by supplying a more complete and flexible parser generator.
• Easy-to-use support for producing attractive output. Currently, output is done by writing code to explicitly fill in table cells with data. We should be able to supply a more convenient interface that also allows for providing machine-readable output.
• Eventually, a plug-in interface for procedures. Over the short term, the interface between the PSPP core and statistical procedures is evolving quickly enough that a plug-in model does not make sense. Over the long term, it may make sense to introduce plug-ins.

What do I need to run PSPP?

As a minimum, you need the following:

• A computer with a 32-bit or wider processor. Intel i386, Motorola m68k, Digital 21x64, and so on, should all work.
• 4MB of memory. More is better, especially for large data sets.
• Enough memory + disk to hold a temporary copy of your data set.
• A POSIX.1 compliant operating system such as GNU or GNU/Linux.
• An ANSI C compiler such as GNU gcc, if you intend to compile PSPP yourself.
• The relevant libraries upon which PSPP depends:
  • gsl and gslcblas
  • libplot

i386 Debian GNU/Linux is the primary development platform, but previous versions have been compiled and tested under other OSes, so porting should not be difficult.

Where can I get PSPP?

Source code for the latest release of PSPP is available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/pspp/.

Older versions may be obtained from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/.

Development sources are available from CVS at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp.

How do I install PSPP?

For the released versions of PSPP, do:

tar -xzf pspp-0.4.0.tar.gz
cd pspp-0.4.0
./configure
make 
make check
su
make install

If you're compiling from the CVS snapshot look in the file README.developer and follow the instructions there.

How do I get started using PSPP?

After you've built and installed PSPP, try this:

1. Using your favourite editor, write a file (name it myfile.syn) containing the following:

   DATA LIST LIST /name (a25) quantity (f8).
   BEGIN DATA.
   widgets 10345
   oojars 2345
   dubreys 98
   thingumies 518
   END DATA.
    
   LIST.
    
   DESCRIPTIVES /quantity
    /statistics ALL.
        

2. Enter the command pspp myfile.syn
3. Look at your results in pspp.list

PSPP is very versatile and there are lots of different types of statistical analysis possible. You need to become familiar with the documentation to unleash its full potential.

What documentation is available?

The PSPP manual, written in Texinfo format, is the primary reference for using PSPP. Besides the Texinfo format a few other formats are available like HTML and PDF. A few additional documentation files are included in the source distribution:

README

A quick introduction to PSPP.

INSTALL

Notes on building and installing.

ChangeLog

Details of the latest bleeding edge changes.

Does PSPP have it's own IRC channel?

Yes! You can find the channel on the freenode network. The channelname is #pspp.

How can I get more information on PSPP?

There are a few resources for PSPP information. The first is this FAQ and related documentation in the distribution and on the web site. The second is the PSPP source code itself, if you are programmatically inclined.

For discussion with other PSPP users our mailinglist pspp-users@gnu.org is available. You can subscribe to this list at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users

Finally, we look forward to all comments and questions related to PSPP. Please send an email to pspp-dev@gnu.org

PSPP lacks this feature which I really need. How can I get PSPP to support it?

There are several ways:

• Download the source code and implement it yourself.
• Hire somebody to implement it for you.
• Send an email to the developers and ask if they'd be prepared to spend the time doing it for you.

Any help you can give is appreciated. See the following question.

Can I help out with PSPP development?

Yes. The author is forming a team to proceed with PSPP development. If you are a statistician, programmer, numerical analyst, or technical writer who wants to work on the PSPP project, you can join the PSPP development mailing list.

Goto http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev where you can subscribe to the mailing list or view the archives.

When you have fixed a bug or improved some parts of PSPP, you can submit your patches at http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=pspp

PSPP also needs:

• Testers

  Testers are welcome to join the development mailing list. If you find a bug, send a bug reports to bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org

• Documentation

  Good quality, tutorial type documentation is currently lacking. We need somebody to take care of this.

If you have any questions about how you can help out, send a mail to pspp-dev@gnu.org

What does PSPP stand for?

PSPP does not have any official acronymic expansion. But they're easy to come up with. For example:

• Perfect Statistics Professionally Presented.
• Probabilities Sometimes Prevent Problems.
• People Should Prefer PSPP.

Send the best ones to me!

I'm having troubles while building release 0.4.0. What to do?

A few system-specific issues have been noted. These may be PSPP bugs or system bugs; we have not yet been able to track them down precisely:

• On Solaris, one or more tests may fail `make check'. We have only seen this reported on Solaris 9 with GCC 3.4.2. Our reporter says that turning off optimization (with -O0) at least masked the symptoms.
• On Mac OS X, GCC 4.0.0 build 4061 has been observed to cause some tests to fail. Later builds should work fine.

Finally, a few extra notes:

• The Sun WorkShop compiler will not work out of the box in this release. Use GCC instead. We will fix this for the next release.
• GCC 4.x reports an inordinate number of warnings for this release. You may ignore these for now. We will fix these for the next release.

If you encounter other troubles than the above noted ones. Please contact us.

mirror provided by: www.mirroring.de and supported by: openPeople, die Community für Freundschaften über das Internet. Bretagne-Liebhaber können über 300 qualitätsgeprüfte Ferienhäuser Bretagne komfortabel per Satelliten-Geo-Suche auswählen und dann die Umgebung des gewünschten Ferienhaus Bretagne aus der Satellitenperspektive prüfen. Versicherungs News finden Sie hier. Mobilfunk News, das Blog über Mobilfunk news. openPeople Blog, das Blog für Freundschaften. Gaype, die Community für Gays.