Re: what essential GUI pieces are left?

[John Darrington]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 02:07:38PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Jason Stover <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 01:40:45PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     >> Jason Stover <address@hidden> writes:
     >> 
     >> > I was just using pspp to check some students' data and thought of
     >> > something that would be very useful and not (I think) too difficult:
     >> > an easy way to save data as a delimited text file, through the
     >> > gui. Not having this has turned into a serious frustration.
     >>...
     >> I can't find command syntax to do this.  Are you aware of any?
     >> Perhaps it should be a new command, or it could be GUI-only,
     >> without any corresponding syntax (though this would be useful
     >> through syntax also).
     >
     > No, and that's what was so frustrating. I was struggling with the
     > PRINT, LIST and WRITE commands to get them to do what I needed, but
     > there wasn't any easy way that only took a glance at the manual.  The
     > behavior of these commands seems to violate the law of least
     > astonishment, too. Not that we can do anything about that since it's
     > the other program's weird behavior that we have to mimic.
     
     OK.
     
     What would the opposite of GET DATA be?  "PUT DATA" perhaps?


To be orthogonal(ish) with the rest of the language, shouldn't it  be
"SAVE DATA" ?

However, I wonder how wise it is to start adding our own commands to
the language in an ad hoc manner.  Adding subcommands to existing
commands is one thing, but complete new commands is another.

J'


-- 
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key.

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature