
I should not have used the terms 4GL and 3GL. I'm just looking for a "simple" way to create a report in R. It appears the R way to generate a report is to "roll your own". There is no report() function analogous to plot() (which is very good)  to generate a report from a table of data. I did not mean to say R is not powerful. But it is obvious that using R is much more geeky then using SAS. The ability to generate standard detail, summary, cross-tabs, and control break reports is very important in government and corporate enterprises. The people who develop R and who use it live in a small ghetto and don't get out much.


On Aug 20, 2010, at 5:33 PM, schuster [via R] wrote:

> Hi, 
> 
> are you looking for something like SAS ODS? 
>  (The terms "4GL" and "declarative programming" are confusing) 
> 
> With SAS ODS an output destination is opened at one place oft the program 
> (e.g. HTML or PDF or both), subsequent procedures then write output to the 
> destination(s). 
> The procedures don't have to know about ODS-Output or say what and where to 
> write to, the output is simply caught and written to the output (graphics, 
> tables, results etc.) 
> 
> Finally the output destination is closed and all the collected output will be 
> written to file(s). 
> 
> The principle is similar to the PDF ouptut with plot(). 
> 
> In my opinion the idea behind SAS ODS is quite nice. It is a fast way to get 
> output into different file formats. You  can get quick (an dirty) results or 
> apply different styles and formatting options (not always easy). 
> 
> I have not (yet) seen something exactly comparable to this in R (doesn't mean 
> there is not a package for this). Other output options exist (as mentioned): 
> Sweave etc. 
> 
> 
> On Thursday 19 August 2010 01:43:07 pm Donald Paul Winston wrote: 
> > Oops, I meant 4GL. Part of SAS involves more or less "declarative" coding 
> > where SAS figures out how to process the information and you don't have to. 
> > Sweave and html generators in R are not what I'm looking for. I'm looking 
> > for a function whose arguments are data, column names, grouping variables, 
> > summary stats, titles, footnotes, etc. Sort of like what plot does except 
> > the function will generate a report. I suppose you could specify an output 
> > format or "printer device" as plain text, rich text, pdf, or html. 
> > 
> 
> -- 
> ---- 
> Friedrich Schuster 
> Dompfaffenweg 6 
> 69123 Heidelberg 
> 
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