A General Program for the Analysis of Surveys

The Use of Electronic Computers in Land‐use Surveys Based on Photo‐interpretation†

“…They therefore require no additional supervision during the performance of their duties, where human beings require continuous and unremitting supervision. Certainly, the statisticians who will necessarily be responsible for specifying the methods of analysis will prefer to instruct a computer, probably by means of one of the general survey programmes (Yates and Simpson, 1960) than to undertake the responsibility of directing human beings.…”

The Development of Statistical Computing at Rothamsted

“…He then thought that the 401 was too limited for what was required, but this proved a somewhat gloomy view and by 1960, the General Survey Program (GSP) was written, which in a revised form, and now termed the Rothamsted General Survey Program (RGSP), continues to provide analyses for all our surveys. This work is described by Simpson (), and Yates and Simpson (). GSP (and RGSP) works in two parts: the first part reads in the sample data unit‐by‐unit, allowing for almost any generality of design, checks the data, stores them on file and forms basic multiway tables; the second part is essentially a table manipulation language operating on the tables produced by the first part.…”

A Statistical Programming Language

“…The Input ofSurvey Data Whereas for experimental data it is feasible to read in and store the whole of the data before beginning the analysis, for survey data this is not usually possible. To cope with large surveys the technique described by Yates and Simpson (1960) is used and the data are read into the store and processed unit by unit.…”