On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Knut Krueger wrote:
I was wondering why it is possible to read long labels from the CVS
files but not from the SPSS files.
The SPSS file formats are not documented, and so we rely on the code
from PSPP. At the time, PSPP did not read long variable names. It
now does, so it would be possible for someone update the SPSS-reading
code to handle long variable names. This is much more complicated
than just changing a #define; the long variable names are stored in a
different part of the file.
I don't expect anyone on R-core to get around to this any time soon.
If you want to try, the current PSPP code is at
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp