Subject: New behavior for getcols()? And new printcol()?

From: "Jakson A. Aquino" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 19:48:47 -0300

Hello!

I added three new menu items for statist. Statist now also
has its ~/.statistrc. All changes are described in the file
CHANGES.

The item "Data management | List data of columns" is a new
version of "List data of one column". The original item is
still there, but I think that we have to choose one of them.
This new item lists as many columns simultaneously as the
user chooses, and allow the jumping to any row. It even has
an advantage over graphical spreadsheets: we can see side by
side columns that are in the extremes of a table with many
columns.

"List data of columns" uses a new version of getcols(), and
I propose the replacement of this function.  Currently, the
user has to answer how many columns he will use in an
analysis before choosing the columns. However, in social
sciences, when we begin to explore a new data base, we
usually don't know very well what to do: sometimes we only
know what variables we will use when we begin to choose
them.  Thus, getcols2() has a new behavior.  The user begins
immediately to choose the variables and finish the list of
columns with a blank line. Statist, and not the user, counts
how many variables were chosen.

I still have to add to getcols2() the possibility of limiting
the number of columns, as required by some analysis (for
example, "Partial linear correlation", which works only with
3, 4 or 5 columns).

The only disadvantage of the new getcols() that I see is
that it will break old scripts. But these scripts will not
begin to yield wrong results (what would be a serious
problem). They will stop working, what is easy to fix. We
might add a warning in the release announcement about that.

Best,

Jakson