[R] R reports

[Frank Harrell]

Your notes are not well thought out.

You'll find that r-help is a friendly place for new users that do not 
come in with an attitude.

I once used SAS (for 23 years) and know it very well.  I wrote the 
first SAS procedures for a graphics device, percentiles, 
logistic regression, and Cox regression.  Its reporting 
for the first 30 years of SAS' existence was quite primitive, and 
since then it is not what I'd call advanced and certainly not 
esthetically pleasing.  Considering that SAS has had tens of billions 
of $ at its disposal for research and development the result is quite 
unimpressive.  Look at the fake PROC EXPORT if you want to get a real 
laugh - it can't even put out valid csv files if there are any 
unmatched quotes inside of character variable values.  It is not even 
a procedure, just a front end to a trivial macro.

The "report" function you outlined is in many ways more primitive than 
many functions already available in R.   See the summary.formula 
function for example in the Hmisc package.  Among other things, some 
of the functions give you flexibility in specifying the criteria by 
which a variable is considered continuous vs. discrete numeric.  They 
also allow you to override statistical tests to include in the table 
with your own functions.  Now one of the functions even automatically 
creates micrographics inside of table cells.

You are welcome to write any R functions you'd like.  The language for 
doing so is richer than the SAS language by a significant margin.

Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chairman        School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010, Donald Paul Winston wrote:

>
> People have been generating reports with a computer for many years. R is
> supposed to be an analytical engine. Report writing is fundamental to any
> kind of analysis tool. SAS has had several report procedures/functions since
> the very beginning(1960's?). SAS stands for Statistical Analysis System. Do
> you really expect users to have to piece together a half dozen or so bits of
> R code to create a report?
>
> It's not like it's difficult to do! I see this new company called Revolution
> Analytics who thinks R is the next big thing. Good grief. Maybe they can
> rescue it from the ghettoized academic world.
> -- 
> View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/R-reports-tp2330733p2333267.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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