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7 Getstats Internals

Getstats defines 21 basic transformations, 11 library functions that are composed of these transformations, and 8 library functions that are Perl snippets. This chapter describes Getstats internals, and each of the transformations, and functions that Getstats provides. We assume you have already read Getstats.

There are a few things that you should know to start off:

  1. You should read through the whole theory of operation. It is complex, but some of that complexity is mandated by the flexibility that is inherent in the new version of Getstats.

    The older version was 762 lines long, and had 20 command line parameters, but all of them were ad-hoc, and extending Getstats for another field was difficult. The new version is 1805 lines long, but has very little built in.

  2. Getstats can be thought of as two separate components. The Getstats transformation engine that defines a few basic transformations (about 350 of the 1500 lines of code). Most of the library transformations are actually built using the basic transformations as a guide.
  3. It helps to know Perl, and do not be afraid of using small perl snippets. To make a table out of a simple 4 thread, 10 run test Getstats evaluates almost 1000 snippets of perl code.

    That being said if you do not know Perl, there are enough predefined things there so that you do not need to worry.

    To get Getstats to do really cool stuff (e.g., more statistical tests) you might need to know the internals, that is why things like variable names are included in this document.