I pushed an improvement to the error message. Now it should say
something like this:
parse.sps:2: error: COMPUTE: This command tries to create a new
variable myvar by assigning a string value to it, but this is not
supported. Use the STRING command to create the new variable with the
correct widt
It would be easy enough for PSPP to see that the expression has string
type, and therefore give the new variable string type too. The reason it
doesn't work that way is that it's not always possible to know the maximum
width of an expression that has string type, but SPSS and PSPP require
string va
I inserted STRING ResidenceZipcodes (A5). in the code and the error message
went away and this new variable did get all the digits beyond 5 truncated.
What confused me is that the original ResidenceZipcode showed on the variables
table to be a string variable. I assumed that the source variable,
