I sure hope so, as we are looking to replace SAS in our workplace with perl. The thing about SAS is that the licensing deal is
horrible. They license not per site, but
per server. And the licensing isn't cheap, either (I've heard 6-digit figures per license). I've always argued that SAS was nothing more than a crappy database with some "nice" reporting. This is nothing that, with a little bit of foresight, can't be accomplished with any other language. Perl (combined with an RDBMS of your choice) comes to mind as a good candidate because of ease of database connectivity, and it's reputation as a reporting language.
thor