Immersion therapy can be done at a later stage after the newly
baptized R  corporate
user is happy with the fact that he can do most of his legacy code in R
easily now .
 I have treading water in the immersion for over a year now.

 Most SAS consultants and corporate users are eager to try out R ..but they
are scared of immersion especially in these cut back times  ...so this could
be a middle step...let me go ahead and create the wrapper SAS package as a
middle ware between r and sas ..

and we will let the invisible hands of  free market decide :))

regards,

ajay

www.decisionstats.com

I am not a Marxist.
Karl Marx <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/k/karlmarx131048.html>

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:01 PM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz@comcast.net>wrote:

> on 02/27/2009 07:57 AM Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> > Ajay ohri wrote:
> >>
> >> I would like to know if we can create a package in which r functions
> >> are renamed closer to sas language.doing so will help people familiar
> >> to SAS to straight away take to R for their work,thus decreasing the
> >> threshold for acceptance - and then get into deeper understanding later.
> >>
> >> since it is a package it would be optional only for people wanting to
> >> try out R from SAS.. Do we have such a package right now..it basically
> >> masks R functions to the equivalent function in another language just
> >> for user ease /beginners
> >>
> >> for example
> >>
> >> creating function for means
> >>  procmeans<-function(x,y)
> >> + {
> >> summary (
> >> subset(x,select=c(x,y))
> >> +
> >> )
> >>
> >> creating function for importing csv
> >>
> >> procimport <-function(x,y)
> >> + {
> >> read.csv(
> >> textConnection(x),row.names=y,na.strings="  "
> >> +
> >> )
> >>
> >>
> >> creating function fo describing data
> >>
> >> procunivariate<-function(x)
> >> + {
> >> summary(x)
> >> +
> >> )
> >>
> >> regards,
> >>
> >> ajay
> >
> > Ajay,
> >
> > This will generate major confusion among users of all types and be hard
> > to maintain.  A better approach is to get Bob Muenchen's excellent book
> > and keep it nearby.
> >
> > Frank
>
> I whole heartedly agree with Frank here. It may be one thing to have a
> "translation" process in place based upon some form of logical mapping
> between the two languages (as Bob's book provides). But is another thing
> entirely to actually start writing functions that provide wrappers
> modeled on SAS based PROCs.
>
> If you do this, then you only serve to obfuscate the fundamental
> philosophical and functional differences between the two languages and
> doom a new useR to missing all of R's benefits. They will continue to
> try to figure out how to use R based upon their "SAS intuition" rather
> than developing a new set of coding and even statistical paradigms.
>
> Having been through the SAS to S/R transition myself, having used SAS
> for much of the 90's and now having used R for over 7 years, I can speak
> from personal experience and state that the only way to achieve the
> requisite proficiency with R is immersion therapy.
>
> Regards,
>
> Marc Schwartz
>

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