Re: status report

[Jason Stover]

Just so no one thinks I quit the project: I'm still working
on the ARMA fitting routines. It's a major pain, and I haven't
had a lot of time for it lately. I didn't check in any code
because I want to finish an initial version before submitting
it for review at savannah.

-Jason

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:00:21AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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-- 
Jason H. Stover
Assistant Professor
Mathematics Department
Georgia College & State University