Inefficiency of SAS Programming

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

www.decisionstats.com <http://www.decisionstats.com>

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 4:27 AM, Frank E Harrell Jr 
<f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu <mailto:f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu>> wrote:

    If anyone wants to see a prime example of how inefficient it is to
    program in SAS, take a look at the SAS programs provided by the US
    Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for risk adjusting and
    reporting for hospital outcomes at
    http://www.qualityindicators.ahrq.gov/software.htm .  The
    PSSASP3.SAS program is a prime example.  Look at how you do a vector
    product in the SAS macro language to evaluate predictions from a
    logistic regression model.  I estimate that using R would easily cut
    the programming time of this set of programs by a factor of 4.

    Frank
    -- 
    Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                        Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University