RECODE, CHISQ issues, and other feedback

[seth]

I've downloaded the 0.4.2 version of pspp and built it.  I'm not a 
regular SPSS user, but my wife is taking a statistics class, and I'm 
looking for something to do basic SPSS stuff.

Her professor gives her data files in SPSS format, which I've been able 
to load with pspp, but one of the datasets has a string format column, 
which I need to make numeric.  I've done a recode in both the psppire 
gui and by cli with RECODE (CONVERT) and it's just setting the value to 
zero for everything.  RECODE is also missing all the THRU src constructs 
for the recode mapping.  CONVERT doesn't seem to be "useful" at the 
moment.  What worked for me was to do ('   1'=1) etc. maps, for all 
values that were strings that needed to be cast to NUMERIC.

Right now I'm just working on getting ONEWAY, T-TEST, CHISQ going based 
off her homework problems as a good "trial run" for pspp.  The computer 
lab at San Jose State University in the Washington Hall has a number of 
machines with SPSS on them, so I have something to compare against.

I REALLY don't think people should have to pay the gobs of money they 
charge for SPSS, so if you guys need any coding to fill in the gaps, let 
me know.  I'll probably be submitting some patches, at least to fix up 
RECODE to at least match the manual's claims for what it does.  I looked 
at the source code to figure out why THRU wasn't working (being 
unimplemented), so I'm already in the code.  I might work on THRU, 
CONVERT, and single-factor chi-square is broken, even though passing 
multiple factors into it seems to work.  CROSSTABS /CELLS=... doesn't do 
what I expect, either.

Also, the HTML driver for CROSSTABS is outputting nonsense for 
the chi-square tests compared to the ASCII layout for some reason I 
haven't looked into.

The GUI seems good for displaying data, but I haven't bothered using it 
to do any syntax creation -- just using straight command-line and the 
texinfo manual.  It seems sparse at the moment, but a good start.

Oh, and maybe you guys can hang out in the #pspp channel on freenode 
where it says you are but nobody actually idles?

BTW, how far along are people with the framework needed to 
implement ANOVA?

Seth