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Re: SAS vs Perl?

by chunlou (Curate)
on Aug 14, 2003 at 14:03 UTC ( [id://283877]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to SAS vs Perl?

First and foremost, SAS is a statistical software. If SAS is a statistics professor; Perl is a baby.

On the other hand, Perl is a much nicer general glue language. SAS has pretty good macros; it's not quite as good as a programming language, compared to Splus or R. (R is a really good free Open Source statistical software by the way; not as bloated as SAS.)

In general, you use Perl to automate stuff around your statistical work, which's best done by SAS

There're something that both SAS and Perl may provide, such as database access and management as well as web publishing.

Many software that come with web publishing turn out to have clumsy web publishing capability, yet the price tags are enormously high. In that case, you're better off using Perl to get the data from your software and publish the data using Perl.

There're many other things SAS provides. So, I'm not sure what else you're also comparing.

In short, Perl can complement SAS more than SAS complement Perl (in a sense that you probably won't be controlling Perl from within SAS). Yet you'll never do in Perl what you'll do in SAS, which is really good at what it's doing (for a dear price).

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Re^2: SAS vs Perl?
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 18, 2009 at 18:12 UTC
    I have about 10 experience with SAS and am currently working through the exersices in "Learning Perl." SAS is no longer, from a revenue standpoint, a "Statistical" package. The "data base" part is huge and SAS is alway trying to get their fingers into every pie (including hosting). They do a very good job. Their people are top notch. If I knew as much PERL as I know SAS, I would use PERL for the web not SAS because PERL is a programming language and is supported by the top minds in web programming.

      Anonymous Monk - I went the other way. I had a Perl background before I was introduced to SAS and wondered how the product could ever justify the license fee, especially as my colleagues wrote everything in proc sql steps and used Perl Pattern Matching for anything more complicated. (I also thought it was rather cheeky how SAS have incorporated Perl Pattern Matching into their product, but that's a separate issue).

      Consequently, I developed a Perl package to provide SAS-style data manipulation natively in Perl, (using a MySQL back end to hold the data.) OK I'm biased but I think it's rather cool.

      Would anyone be interested? It's still in a very early stage and there is minimal error handling. I'm happy to make the code available to others, as I've taken loads from the Perl community without really contributing...but I'm a bit daunted by CPAN as I've never released anything before .....but if anyone was interested or wanted a copy....get in touch.

        That would be a godsend for me. Please upload it!

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