[R] things that are difficult/impossible to do in SAS or SPSSbut simple in R

[Tim Churches]

hadley wickham wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2008 1:19 PM, Jeffrey J. Hallman <jhallman at frb.gov> wrote:
>> Frank E Harrell Jr <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> 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