Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 10:18:52 -0500
Reply-To: Priscilla Lippincott <plippincott@Peds.umaryland.edu>
Sender: "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Priscilla Lippincott <plippincott@Peds.umaryland.edu>
Subject: Re: Hang-up running syntax in SPSS 9
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Richard and ListServ,
The period is the required command terminator at the end of every line for
SPSS/Windows
(vers. 10.0). Is that not nec for SPSS mainframe?
Priscilla Lippincott, M.S.
Research Analyst
Department of Pediatrics
University of Maryland, Baltimore
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ristow [mailto:wrristow@mindspring.com]
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 2:14 PM
To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Hang-up running syntax in SPSS 9
I've been writing and running a lot of syntax files, using SPSS 9 for
Windows. They're heavily commented, typically beginning like this:
/* ...................... Begin JM0116.SPS ...................... */
/* 08 Mar 2002 */
/* Original path: c:\B_Client\Martha Lang\JM01\JM0116.SPS */
/* Reads !SAVE(CohBase) Basic data for HFI cohort, by WRR, */
/* 11 Dec 2001 */
I run them by opening them in SPSS, selecting all the text, and
clicking the Run button on the syntax toolbar.
I've just created such a syntax file by adding code to a previously
working file. The new file will not run that way, nor by selecting
"All" from the Run menu. At first, it gave warning message "Missing
command terminator. OK to run?" and, if I selected "Yes", stopped at
the first blank line. (This was within the header comments. There was
no command, nor command terminator, in the syntax up to that point.) I
tried getting rid of all blank lines (replacing them by a pair of
comment delimiters: "/**/"); then, it runs through the first actual
command and stops. If I step through the file, starting each time where
it's stopped and selecting "To end" from the Run menu, it always runs
until completing from one to a few commands (not always just one) and stops.
I have checked the file with a hex editor, and can identify nothing
strange, certainly not near the beginning. The only apparent
non-printable characters are x'000A' pairs separating lines of the
syntax file; the same occur in the syntax files that have given no trouble.
It's not the SPSS installation. Other syntax files still run as expected.
Any ideas? I know that SPSS's syntax rules for commands are
complicated, and vary depending on the circumstances (they're not quite
the same for files run with INCLUDE, for example), but I don't see the
answer to this one.
This is impractical as well as mystifying. I'm aware there
