[R] Inefficiency of SAS Programming

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Mon Mar 2 14:14:33 CET 2009


On 3/2/2009 6:57 AM, Thomas Levine wrote:
> R depends on all of those things to run, but you only have to use those
> programs through R. The software depends on these other tools, but the human
> doesn't have to switch interfaces.

In fact, it doesn't even depend on them to run.  Most Windows users 
don't have perl, latex, any of the unix tools, an external tcl/tk system 
(R includes one), or a C compiler.  (Most *nix users have them, but 
don't need them for running R, with the exception of tcl/tk, which is 
used by a number of packages.)  You only need them to build packages, or 
to build R.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Tom!
> 
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com
>> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Frank E Harrell Jr
>> <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
>> > Ajay ohri wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Sometimes for the sake of simplicity, SAS coding is created like that.
>> One
>> >> can use the concatenate function and drag and drop in an simple excel
>> sheet
>> >> for creating elaborate SAS code like the one mentioned and without any
>> time
>> >> at all.
>> >
>> > A system that requires Excel for its success is not a complete system.
>>
>> To be fair R depends on perl (although this dependence seems to be
>> decreasing
>> lately and possibly will be eliminated), latex and a bunch of unix
>> tools.  Developing
>> GUIs depends on tcl/tk or other external system and developing fast code
>> can require that some of it be written in C.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.




More information about the R-help mailing list