1 PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is
2 a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
4 PSPP supports T-tests, ANOVA and GLM analyses, factor analysis,
5 non-parametric tests, and other statistical features. PSPP produces
6 statistical reports in plain text, PDF, PostScript, CSV, HTML, SVG,
7 and OpenDocument formats.
9 PSPP has both text-based and graphical user interfaces. The PSPP
10 user interface has been translated into a number of languages.
12 Instructions for PSPP installation are in INSTALL, including a list of
13 prerequisite packages and other PSPP-specific information. Full
14 documentation on PSPP's language is also included.
16 For information on differences from previous versions, please see file
19 Source code for the latest release of PSPP is available at
20 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/pspp/. Older versions may be obtained from
21 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/. Development sources are available
22 at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp
24 The following miscellaneous notes apply to this release:
26 * On a few operating systems, such as OpenBSD, some of the
27 tests may fail with messages similar to: 'Warning: cannot
28 create a convertor for "646" to "UTF-8"'. These test
29 failures may safely be ignored.
31 Questions and comments about using PSPP may be sent to pspp-users@gnu.org.
32 Bug reports may be filed at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=pspp
33 or emailed to bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org. We prefer the web-based system
34 because it makes it more difficult for us to lose track of bugs, but we
35 are happy to hear from users through any means.
37 The long term goals for PSPP are ambitious. We wish to provide the
38 following support to users:
40 * All of the SPSS transformation language. PSPP already
41 supports a large subset of it.
43 * All the statistical procedures that someone is willing to
44 implement, whether they exist in SPSS or not.
46 * Compatibility with SPSS syntax, including compatibility with
47 known bugs and warts, where it makes sense. We also provide
48 an "enhanced" mode in certain cases where PSPP can output
49 better results that may surprise SPSS users.
51 * Friendly textual and graphical interfaces. This release
52 includes the first version of PSPPIRE, the PSPP graphical
55 * Good documentation. Currently the PSPP manual describes its
56 language completely, but we would like to add information on
57 how to select statistical procedures and interpret their
60 * Efficient support for very large data sets. For procedures
61 where it is practical, we wish to efficiently support data
62 sets many times larger than physical memory. The framework
63 for this feature is already in place. It has not been tuned
64 or extensively tested, however initial experience has given
67 Over the long term, we also wish to provide support to developers who
68 wish to extend PSPP with new statistical procedures, by supplying the
71 * Easy-to-use support for parsing language syntax. Currently,
72 parsing is done by writing "recursive descent" code by hand,
73 with some support for automated parsing of the most common
74 constructs. We wish to improve the situation by supplying a
75 more complete and flexible parser generator.
77 * Easy-to-use support for producing attractive output.
78 Currently, output is done by writing code to explicitly fill
79 in table cells with data. We should be able to supply a
80 more convenient interface that also allows for providing
81 machine-readable output.
83 * Eventually, a plug-in interface for procedures. Over the
84 short term, the interface between the PSPP core and
85 statistical procedures is evolving quickly enough that a
86 plug-in model does not make sense. Over the long term, it
87 may make sense to introduce plug-ins.
89 For any copyright year range specified as YYYY-ZZZZ in this package note
90 that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.