it is meaningless to compare these two on data manipulation

you can always 'do it all, nothing else is needed' with the software that you MASTER. No matter how good the software is, if you are not good at it, you still can't do anything, right?

As for data analysis, R has many state-of-art packages to conduct sophisticated statistical analysis, however, since most packages are contributed by users and no quality is guranteed, you better off write your own or use those established ones. For SAS, you don't have quality concerns but you still have to write you own if you want to use new methodologies.

While being free of charge is one major advantages of R, big companies are not very sensitive about SAS's 'expensive' annual license fees which actually is trivial comparing to the dinner expense of executives....

On Wed, 6 May 2009 17:45:27 -0400, Peter Flom <peterflomconsulting@MINDSPRING.COM> wrote:

>Over on R-help, there is a big discussion on how great R is for data manipulation. > >Most of it is just "R does it all, nothing else is needed" some of it, though, is >"Why would anyone use SAS?" > >I don't know enough about data manipulation in either program to say why >SAS is better. > >Peter > > >Peter L. Flom, PhD >Statistical Consultant >www DOT peterflomconsulting DOT com