Re: windows installers

[Ben Pfaff]

On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 12:44 PM John Darrington
<john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 11:00:44AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>
>      Yes, I agree. Classic SPSS isn't general purpose enough to write
>      statistical procedures
>      that are as easy to use as the ones built into it. The SPSS language 
> manages to
>      be a misery of inconsistencies that make it near impossible to 
> generalize.
>      The macro language (which I'm currently implementing), which appears to 
> be
>      meant for extensions, is terrible.
>
>      Maybe we will eventually be able to implement the Python extensions to 
> SPSS.
>      Those are the most fruitful direction I've seen toward making SPSS 
> programmable
>      in a reasonably friendly way.
>
> Some years ago I wrote an experimental scheme interface which seemed to work 
> quite well.
> Perhaps I'll dig it up again some time.  The biggest complication as I 
> remember was
> dealing with missing values.  They always complicate matters in unexpected 
> ways.

Scheme (Guile) is unlikely to be as useful as Python  to our users,
since I imagine
that some of them already have Python programs for SPSS.