Re: libpspp + Perl module somewhere down the road?

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 04:13:56PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > Actually, it's a Perl module that I've done.   I did it by special
     > request of a third party.   I think it's mostly complete. Currently
     > it's sitting in a directory on my PC somewhere just waiting for me to
     > tidy it up a bit.
     
     Want to post it as a patch when you get a chance?  It sounds like
     we have some amount of user demand for it.


I'll try to get around to it at the week-end.   I read Joerg's mail
again, and unfortunately it's not going to solve his problem, because
he's interesting in reading .sav files whereas my perl module only
writes them.  However, it does set up the framework for creating perl
bindings to the src/data directory, so perhaps even a moderately
skilled programmer could extend it.
     
     > Integrating it into PSPP will require some (not too hard) changes to
     > the src/data tree.  One of the problems is that src/data depends on
     > libgsl --- but for a trivial reason --- it uses gsl_is_finite.  I
     > think we did this because the C99 isfinite function wasn't available
     > on BSD or something.  Unfortunately it's not yet part of gnulib
     > either.
     
     I'll make that the next gnulib module that I write, then.  

That would be good.  You can probably cut and paste the content of the
gsl function.
     
     My one request, at this point, would be that there be at least
     one regression test on "make check" that tries out the Perl
     module, so that it doesn't get broken by accident.  (Running the
     test would be conditional on the Perl module being configured, I
     suppose, but I'd be happy to always configure in the Perl module
     for my own testing.)

The module comes with several tests already.  I think a couple are
failing against the most recent CVS. I need to investigate that.

J'

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