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

[Walter Paczkowski]

Good morning,

I use SAS and R/S-Plus as my primary tools so I have a lot of experience with these programs.  By far and away, SAS is superior for handling the "messy" datasets, but also the very large ones.  I work at times with datasets in the hundreds of thousands (and on occasion, millions) of records.  SAS, and especially PROC SQL, are invaluable for this.  But once I get to datasets manageable for R/S-Plus, then I ship to these tools for the programming and graphics.  This seems to work great.

Walt Paczkowski
Data Analytics Corp.


-----Original Message-----
>From: Rob Robinson <rob.robinson at bto.org>
>Sent: Jan 17, 2008 4:31 AM
>To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
>Subject: Re: [R] things that are difficult/impossible to do in SAS or	SPSSbut simple in R
>
>
>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
>
>*** Want to know about Britain's birds? Try  www.bto.org/birdfacts ***
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>Dr Rob Robinson, Senior Population Biologist
>British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk, IP24 2PU
>Ph: +44 (0)1842 750050         E: rob.robinson at bto.org
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>
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>  
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
>> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Jeffrey J. Hallman
>> Sent: 16 January 2008 22:38
>> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
>> Subject: Re: [R] things that are difficult/impossible to do 
>> in SAS or SPSSbut simple in R
>> 
>> SAS has no facilities for date arithmetic and no easy way to 
>> build it yourself.  In fact, that's the biggest problem with 
>> SAS: it stinks as a programming environment, so it's always 
>> much more difficult than it should be to do something new.  
>> As soon as you get away from the canned procs and have to 
>> write something of your own, SAS falls down.
>> 
>> I don't know enough about SPSS to comment.
>> --
>> Jeff
>> 
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>
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