Date:         Wed, 2 Jul 2008 23:57:54 -0700
Reply-To:     RolandRB <rolandberry@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         RolandRB <rolandberry@HOTMAIL.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      "SAS to R to SAS" by Phil Holland
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
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Here is a good paper entitled "SAS to R to SAS" by Phil Holland.

http://www.hollandnumerics.co.uk/pdf/SAS2R2SAS_paper.pdf

It is a good marriage of SAS and R that I think is an ideal jumping
off point for the use of R alongside SAS in the pharmaceutical
industry. The more I read, the less I think that SAS is going to "go
away" for the purposes of clinical reporting and be replaced by R. R
currently can't handle large volumes of data such as lab data. SAS
can. So with SAS staying around then it is likely that all data
manipulation will be done using SAS. So that's us SAS programmers who
do clinical reporting still safe in our jobs..........

......However, I do see R being used alongside SAS. The ideal
situation is to call R from a SAS program that does all the data
manipulation, to run the R code using a system call and to incorporate
the R log output into the SAS log output. This is the best of both
worlds since this way data of any volume can be easily manipulated, we
can use routines or special statistical analysis in R where needed and/
or produce its famous "superior graphics" that can be incorporated
into output and have both the SAS and R logs in the same file where it
can be scanned for errors, warnings and important notes.

Phil's paper is a good jumping off point, as I said. I wouldn't have
done things quite that way and for us SAS programmers, a lot more
detail would be helpful. I hope to create some pages on my web site
sometime that goes into this in a lot of detail so that clinical sas
programmers can comfortably make the transition across into
incorporating R code in their SAS programs.