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Latest news: 4th October 2002
GAUSS training 30.9.02-3.10.02. Trying out a new teaching plan, and testing exercises and explanations for the forthcoming "Introduction to GAUSS for Economists". Many thanks to those who took part for comments and suggestions. Book should be coming out in a couple of months. Please send me an email if you want further details.
History
These pages are a development of the site which was hosted on the Scottish Doctoral Programme computers from some years. The site was rewritten fundamentally and transferred to Trig in early 2002, partly because it was ugly and badly written, partly because it hadn't been changed since GAUSS version 3.2, about 1997.
The manual was rewritten for version 4 of GAUSS. In August 2002 version 5 was released, and the site will be amended for this in due course.
We will also be moving to a style-sheet based version. I've avoided this in the past because this doesn't work on some older browsers - specifically, Netscape 4. However, Netscape 4 is unable to format properly the guide as it stands - it's readable but not pretty. So the next version will be restricted to "modern" (ie largely standards-compliant) browsers: IE 5.5 and above, Netscape 6 and above, and Opera 5 and above. The site is tested in a variety of browsers and operating systems. If you find a problem, please let me know.
GAUSS versions - a quick guide
Because the core of GAUSS doesn't change much, programs tend to persist for a long time - some of my code is ten years old. This is a brief summary of major version changes in GAUSS. It's done from memory and doesn't pretend to be definitive, but should give you a rough idea of how things have changed, why old programs may work differently or not at all, and whether you should be thinking about upgrading.
- 1990 Version 3.0
First version to use power of PC maths processors; came in separate version for simple and complex matrices - 1992 Dataset definition changed
- 1996 Version 3.2
First Windows version. GAUSS386 and GAUSS-i recombined into one program again. Windows interface not very helpful and only partially implemented. Major changes in programming - long variable names, FOR loops, string arrays. - 1999 Version 3.6
Windows interface significantly improved, including help system. - 2002 Version 4.0
Revised interface. Command-based version available as TGAUSS. Excellent debugger fully implemented. Extraordinary rewrite of CON. Direct reading from and writing to spreadsheets and PC database formats. Structures introduced. Many windowing commands and OS management features (missing value trapping, memory management etc) dropped. - 2002 Version 5.0
Arrays of structures and multidimensional arrays introduced. Spreadsheet etc access completely rewritten and v4 commands obsoleted. System functions barred from procedure variables - not sure yet whether bug or design "feature".
