Some thoughts on Bernard’s comments. Ease of use in a teaching setting is important, but I appreciate why some of the decisions have been made (largely to simplify the parser).
On Jan 3, 2017, Bernard wrote:
- I guess ": =" instead of "=" is because of the Mac or Linux? In any case, it is complicated to teach (less intuitive). Except for the equivalences (like Stata with the "=" and the "==" …
I can live with this; I’ve not done much programming in a language that requires :=, but a few errors and I’m used to it.
- Same for "!" instead "/“ ?
! is hard to type; I would also prefer /. I think the only potential conflict is with arithmetic in a statement, but is there a case where statement with / for divide could also have an option on it?
- Please use both upper and lower case for commands and variable names
I think the proposal is to let the user use case for ease of reading, but that there should be no reason to have two variables Age and age. I don’t like mixed case for programming as it multiplies syntax errors greatly.
- After the "freq" command, the percentages are written in the vertical form and should be followed by "! c" instead of "! r”
Agree, these are column percentages; for consistency with ‘tables’, !r and !c should have the same meaning
- Some personal demands for pedagogical purposes:
= The "means"! t "command should show the result of the" t "test in case of two averages, and the result of ANOVA in case of more than two averages. I know that que le "F" est the square of the "t" for comparison of two averages.
There may be times when F is useful, even for comparing two means. Can we have both or option for both?
= Provide a complement to the "regress" command to get the regression line (as in the old Epi-Info "(eg"! Line ") = For the comparison of percentages, in case of insufficient calculated numbers (Ncell <5), do not calculate the chi-square and the "p" of the chi-square, and present the Fisher test for two percentages (the software "R" also presents the Fisher test for more than two percentages).
I liked the traditional Analysis option for exact tests, but also realize that the developers can make logical decisions here. Getting different output may be confusing to the new user. I wonder if there could be a ‘newbie’ setting that would provide more explanation of output to the statistically naive user. What I have never liked about SPSS is that is was so easy to get garbage out; it is more difficult to make SAS or R or Stata work if you don’t know what you are doing. Analysis should be somewhere in between; ease of use and relevant output have always been a strong point of Analysis.
Jamie