[R-pkgs] New versions of Hmisc and Design on CRAN

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

New versions of source packages for Hmisc and Design are available from 
CRAN for R 1.9 on Linux/Unix.   Knowing Uwe Ligges, a Windows binary is 
not far behind.  Changelogs are at 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/ChangelogHmisc and
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/ChangelogDesign . 
These versions pass R CMD check for the latest R-devel so I expect they 
will work on the next production release of R.

Of special note is the Hmisc sasxport.get function's new method='csv' 
argument.  This works with a SAS macro to use SAS PROC EXPORT to export 
an entire data library, and handles variable and value labels, date, 
time, data/time variables [for dates, the new R Date class is now used 
as is also now used for sas.get, spss.get, csv.get].  We have found the 
new SAS import method in sasxport.get to be the most reliable way to 
convert datasets from SAS if you can run SAS on your system or on a 
server.  An example may be found at 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/SASexportHowto and 
the SAS macro is at 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/pub/Main/Hmisc/exportlib.sas . 
The main page for Hmisc is http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/s/Hmisc . 
sasxport.get largely supplants sas.get.

For those users who are not familiar with the Hmisc/LaTeX combination, 
have a look at 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/pub/Main/StatReport/summary.pdf

Thanks to Kurt Hornik for always providing such an excellent service to 
the community through his work on CRAN.
-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University