hadley wickham wrote: > On Jan 18, 2008 1:19 PM, Jeffrey J. Hallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Frank E Harrell Jr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> >>> Rob Robinson wrote: >>>> I wonder if those who complain about SAS as a programming environment have >>>> discovered SAS/IML which provides a programming environment akin to Matlab >>>> which is more than capable (at least for those problems which can be >>>> treated >>>> with a matrix like approach). As someone who uses both SAS and R - >>>> graphical >>>> output is so much easier in R, but for handling large 'messy' datasets SAS >>>> wins hands down... >>>> Cheers >>>> Rob >>> My understanding is that PROC IML is disconnected from the rest of the >>> SAS language, e.g., you can't have a loop in which PROC GENMOD is called >>> or datasets are merged. If that's the case, IML is not very competitive >>> in my view. >> I know about IML, but have never really used it. Back when I was doing that >> kind of stuff (before discovering S-Plus) I used GAUSS for compute-intensive >> matrix simulations and the like. I didn't have SAS for my PC, and there was >> no way I could tie up the Sun boxes at work with simulations for my thesis. >> >> But while IML does some nice stuff, it just reinforces the point I made in >> another post about the proliferation of "little languages" in SAS. By my >> count, >> that are now 5: >> >> 1. data step programming >> 2. macros -- a 'language' grafted on top of data step programming >> 3. scl -- if you want to do any kind of user interface >> 4. af -- object-oriented framework built on top of scl >> 5. iml -- matrix language like GAUSS, but doesn't play well with 1:4 above. > > 6. the "proc" language
7. java - used to create SAS web applications via webAF etc 7a. JavaScript 8. C, FORTRAN, PL/I, or IBM assembler - if you want to create a new first-class function or procedure in SAS using SAS/TOOLKIT (otherwise you only have pseudo-functions via the SAS macro language and all its horrors). Tim C ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
