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1 Introduction

This manual is a guide to PSPP internals. Its intended audience is developers who wish to modify or extend PSPP’s capabilities. The use of PSPP is documented in a separate manual. See Introduction in PSPP Users Guide.

This manual is both a tutorial and a reference manual for PSPP developers. It is ultimately intended to cover everything that developers who wish to implement new PSPP statistical procedures and other commands should know. It is currently incomplete, partly because existing developers have not yet spent enough time on writing, and partly because the interfaces not yet documented are not yet mature enough to making documenting them worthwhile.

PSPP developers should have some familiarity with the basics of PSPP from a user’s perspective. This manual attempts to refer to the PSPP user manual’s descriptions of concepts that PSPP users should find familiar at the time of their first reference. However, it is probably a good idea to at least skim the PSPP manual before reading this one, if you are not already familiar with PSPP.