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