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.