Paste - A Tool to Put Application Systems Together Easily

The collections of statistical packages, tabulation systems, and database systems that have grown up in the past 10 years constitute a significant advance in the tools available to the statistician. Unfortunately, each of these tools is limited. The developer of an application system using these tools is often faced with the difficult problem of stringing these systems together to get a complete application system. Two approaches have been applied to alleviating this problem. Arguments are advanced against each of these approaches. A new solution to the problem is proposed. The solution is a system called PASTE whose purpose is to Put Application Systems Together Easily. A preliminary design of this highly flexible and extensible data description and file transformation system is described.