User talk:Hailholyghost: Difference between revisions

Hi Eoraptor, thanks for your suggestions. I've tried to re-edit my code as much as I could. I am new, and am learning from old code. I don't know how I can make the code idiomatic. I make sure that the output is correct before I post the code. Please feel free to edit what I put, I won't be insulted.--[[User:Hailholyghost|Hailholyghost]] ([[User talk:Hailholyghost|talk]]) 20:01, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

:Done. A few notes: I use Python 3 (the only visible difference here is I write <code>print("something")</code>, not <code>print "something"</code>). I put the betain in a separate function: easier to debug, easier to reuse. While the naming convention is debatable, I feel it's more readable to have short names in long formulas. The main welch_ttest function returns what is usually printed when doing that kind of test: statistic, degrees of freedom, p-value. I have limited the output to one example, but I'll add the other ones if you wish.

:I translated the betain function from Stata, as it's very little work, but there is still a problem with the license. I asked the RSS, but got no response. My problem is: the Applied Statistics routines were written by various authors, however the RSS claims to hold copyright on all the code. Why not, but there is no mention of the exact license (except that code should be freely redistributed). The GPL is much more explicit, and I don't think Burkardt had the right to reditribute a translation of AS 63 under GPL (at least, I have no evidence showing he was entitled to do so). It's a well-known problem with ancient numerical codes. By ancient, I mean 70s and 80s: code was often distributed with no specific notion of license, nothing was ever explicit. And years later software engineering was more "formalized", and the status of old code was not very clear. It's one of the reason the GSL was created: a kind of modern SLATEC, with explicit GPL license. And because old code licenses were so fuzzy, the GSL guys decided '''not''' to reuse the "golden oldies" like SLATEC, CMLIB, NSWC, MATH77... those large generalist numerical libraries from the 70s, often written by US governement personel or at least with US government funding (so there should be no problem, however the copyright holders are usually not known, and there may be surprises). From time to time other free software projects consider using them, but the answer is always the same: too unclear, too risky.

:Long story short: don't use these codes in software you plan to redistribute.