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

[Jeffrey J. Hallman]

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.

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