Inefficiency of SAS Programming

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