Jeffrey J. Hallman 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. > > To be a competent SAS programmer you need to keep 5 different languages > with 5 different sets of rules in your head while you're coding. I can't do > this, and I've never met anyone who could. The SAS programmers I've worked > with all had to consult manuals or example code frequently to figure out how > to do anything complicated. With R, you just write it. > > I've rewritten a number of ugly SAS programs in R. Typically, the R code is a > third or less the size of the SAS code, although I just did a program a couple > of days ago in which 112 lines of R replaced two SAS programs totalling 1900 > lines of code, for an 18:1 reduction. Now you could argue that those were > poorly-written SAS programs, and I would agree. But in my experience, most > SAS programs are poorly written. SAS provides such poor programming tools > that most good programmers move on to something else as soon as they can. > > Jeff
I think that the phrase "ugly SAS" is a redundancy... BTW, you have likely heard the old joke about the international obfuscated programming contest, which was open to all programming languages? The winner? A one line SAS macro... If you want to see some nice examples of obfuscated Perl: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Obfuscated Code Cheers, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ 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.
