[R] Inefficiency of SAS Programming

Wensui Liu liuwensui at gmail.com
Fri Feb 27 05:51:50 CET 2009


Thanks for pointing me to the SAS code, Dr Harrell
After reading codes, I have to say that the inefficiency is not
related to SAS language itself but the SAS programmer. An experienced
SAS programmer won't use much of hard-coding, very adhoc and difficult
to maintain.
I agree with you that in the SAS code, it is a little too much to
evaluate predictions. such complex data step actually can be replaced
by simpler iml code.

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Frank E Harrell Jr
<f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> If anyone wants to see a prime example of how inefficient it is to program
> in SAS, take a look at the SAS programs provided by the US Agency for
> Healthcare Research and Quality for risk adjusting and reporting for
> hospital outcomes at http://www.qualityindicators.ahrq.gov/software.htm .
>  The PSSASP3.SAS program is a prime example.  Look at how you do a vector
> product in the SAS macro language to evaluate predictions from a logistic
> regression model.  I estimate that using R would easily cut the programming
> time of this set of programs by a factor of 4.
>
> Frank
> --
> Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
>                     Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University
>
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-- 
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WenSui Liu
Acquisition Risk, Chase
Blog   : statcompute.spaces.live.com

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