1 PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It
2 is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
4 PSPP development is ongoing. It already supports a large subset of
5 SPSS's syntax. Its statistical procedure support is currently
6 limited, but growing. At your option, PSPP will produce statistical
7 reports in ASCII, PostScript, or HTML formats.
10 Instructions for PSPP installation are in INSTALL, including a list of
11 prerequisite packages and other PSPP-specific information. Full
12 documentation on PSPP's language will be installed along with the
15 For information on differences from previous versions, please see file
18 Source code for the latest release of PSPP is available at
19 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/pspp/. Older versions may be obtained from
20 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/. Development sources are available from
21 CVS at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp
23 Questions and comments about using PSPP may be sent to pspp-users@gnu.org.
24 Bug reports may be filed at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=pspp
25 or emailed to bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org. We prefer the web-based system
26 because it makes it more difficult for us to lose track of bugs, but we
27 are happy to hear from users through any means.
29 The long term goals for PSPP are ambitious. We wish to provide the
30 following support to users:
32 * All of the SPSS transformation language. PSPP already
33 supports a large subset of it.
35 * All the statistical procedures that someone is willing to
36 implement, whether they exist in SPSS or not.
38 * Compatibility with SPSS syntax, including compatibility with
39 known bugs and warts, where it makes sense. We also provide
40 an "enhanced" mode in certain cases where PSPP can output
41 better results that may surprise SPSS users.
43 * Friendly textual and graphical interfaces. This release
44 includes the first version of PSPPIRE, the PSPP graphical
47 * Attractive output, including graphs, in a variety of human-
48 and machine-readable formats. PSPP currently produces
49 output in ASCII, PostScript, and HTML formats. We will
50 enhance PSPP's output formatting in the future.
52 * Good documentation. Currently the PSPP manual describes its
53 language completely, but we would like to add information on
54 how to select statistical procedures and interpret their
57 * Efficient support for very large data sets. For procedures
58 where it is practical, we wish to efficiently support data
59 sets many times larger than physical memory. The framework
60 for this feature is already in place. It has not been tuned
61 or extensively tested, however initial experience has given
64 Over the long term, we also wish to provide support to developers who
65 wish to extend PSPP with new statistical procedures, by supplying the
68 * Easy-to-use support for parsing language syntax. Currently,
69 parsing is done by writing "recursive descent" code by hand,
70 with some support for automated parsing of the most common
71 constructs. We wish to improve the situation by supplying a
72 more complete and flexible parser generator.
74 * Easy-to-use support for producing attractive output.
75 Currently, output is done by writing code to explicitly fill
76 in table cells with data. We should be able to supply a
77 more convenient interface that also allows for providing
78 machine-readable output.
80 * Eventually, a plug-in interface for procedures. Over the
81 short term, the interface between the PSPP core and
82 statistical procedures is evolving quickly enough that a
83 plug-in model does not make sense. Over the long term, it
84 may make sense to introduce plug-ins.