Accuracy of Sample Moments Calculations among Widely Used Statistical Programs

Four widely used statistical program packages.BMDP, SPSS, DATATEXT, and OSIRIS.were compared for computational accuracy on sample means, standard deviations, and correlations.Only one, BMDP, was not seriously inaccurate in calculations on a data set of three observations.Further, SPSS computed inaccurate statistics in a discriminant analysis on a real data set of 848 observations.It is recommended that the desk calculator algorithm, found in most of these programs, not be used in packages which may run on short word length machines.