[R] Comparison of SAS & R/Splus

[Paul, David A]

I am one of only 5 or 6 people in my organization making the
effort to include R/Splus as an analysis tool in everyday work -
the rest of my colleagues use SAS exclusively.

Today, one of them made the assertion that he believes the
numerical algorithms in SAS are superior to those in Splus
and R -- ie, optimization routines are faster in SAS, the SAS
Institute has teams of excellent numerical analysts that
ensure its superiority to anything freely available, PROC 
NLMIXED is more flexible than nlme( ) in the sense that it 
allows a much wider array of error structures than can be used 
in R/Splus, &etc.  

I obviously do not subscribe to these views and would like 
to refute them, but I am not a numerical analyst and am still 
a novice at R/Splus.  Do there exist refereed papers comparing the 
numerical capabilities of these platforms?  If not, are there 
other resources I might look up and pass along to my colleagues?



Much thanks in advance,
 
 david paul