Date:         Tue, 30 May 2006 09:03:09 -0700
Reply-To:     lzhang9830@YAHOO.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Lei Zhang <lzhang9830@YAHOO.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: SAS as a programming language (OT: Response)
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi  Gerhard and Howard,
      What I wanted to point out before is that SAS is slow to follow
the advance in computer science. The syntax it uses is very similiar to
old languages like JCL, Fortran or PL/1, which were good languages at
that time.  Since then, SAS has been struggled to borrow some new
langauge features from OO, but hasn't been successful yet. I heard that
they were going to provide user-define function feature for Data step
in SAS 9.2 after many requests from users.  Personally I think they
should have provided this feature ten years ago, not until next year or
later. I hope significant  changes will be made in SAS 10 in order for
them to catch up with the times.

LZ