status update

[Ben Pfaff]

I'm quite busy at the moment working on a paper for NSDI 07,
which is going to be the second half of my PhD thesis, so it is
unlikely that I will get much PSPP work done between now and the
Oct. 9 deadline.

I've accomplished some PSPP work in the past few weeks, but it is
not yet ready for review.  I am essentially finished with
revamping the input and output formatting code, as well as
rewriting the documentation.  I am now working on adding strict
tests of functionality and comparing PSPP's input and output
against SPSS's.

I also went off on a significant tangent in which I wrote a bunch
of code for converting among integer and floating-point formats.
This will allow PSPP to read and write little-endian, big-endian,
and VAX-endian integer data, as well as IEEE 754, VAX, and IBM
mainframe hexadecimal floating-point formats, regardless of the
architecture that PSPP actually runs on.  I tried to acquire some
system files for testing the VAX and IBM support by posting on
the SPSS newsgroup, but no one replied, so I will probably not
be able to test this support for system files, only for plain
data files.

-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: address@hidden
web: http://benpfaff.org