On Tue, 2 May 2000 10:23:42 +0200, John Hendrickx
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> > It depends.
> > What kinds of stat will you do?
> > How much value do you put on your time?
> > What disciplines do you work with?
> > Who can you get help from?
> > Who will go over you syntax and outputs to check your work?
> >
> > If you need to do a great deal of data transformation (e.g., recoding)
> > and will be dealing with many kinds of data from different sources,
> > then I would choose SPSS. It has the best human factors in GUI,
> > consistency of syntax across procedures, vocabulary choice, clarity of
> > documentation, and clarity of syntax code.
JH>
> I don't agree with this description of SPSS at all. I would say its
> syntax is the worst I've seen (compared to SAS, Stata, GLIM, BMDP). SPSS
> syntax is unnecessarily verbose and certainly not consistent across
> procedures. SPSS is good at elementary operations such as recode but poor
> at advanced applications such as arrays, macros. It does have a good GUI
Syntax is worse than SAS?
Just a couple of years ago, an online SAS braggart claimed that SAS
had extra, easy functions, and after I pressed him, he listed 5 of
them. I showed where SPSS matched them all -- exactly the same
functions, and the syntax hardly varied, either (so much for
verbosity). However, on the testimony of everyon I asked, it used to
take twice as many runs to get SAS to work, compared to SPSS, back in
the pure syntax days.
If you like GUI, I guess you may want to judge by GUI. I need to save
all my SPSS setup lines permanently, and I make my new versions out of
tho old ones; so I don't need GUI for much, even when I use my PC
version.
Mostly, I still use SPSS 6.x on VAX, since that lets me readily edit
and shorten the output file, using any of three or more different file
editors, while I am deciding what to print.
< snip, about SAS, SPSS, Stata, Excel >
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
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