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wrristow@MINDSPRING.COM wrote:
>At 06:31 PM 11/10/2005, Sigurd Hermansen asked:
>
> >You may want to mention to anyone interested an APL to SAS/IML
> >conversion, or to what other SAS products.
>
>That's very much to the point. Of the languages I've written, I can't
>think of two more dissimilar than APL and SAS. (OK, IBM JCL; but that's
>not a programming language by any usual definition.)
>
>APL processes arrays well, so converting to IML is a sound conjecture.
>But nobody can begin without knowing about your APL code, meaning both
>what it accomplishes, and how it's written.
>
>At one extreme, one could use APL, clumsily, to do things the SAS DATA
>step does, and then the conversion would probably work. I imagine any
>statistical procedures would be written in APL as a matrix language,
>and you'd have to find and use the equivalent SAS procedures.
>
>On the other hand, if the APL code is written more like most APL - I'm
>rusty, but most of it uses a lot of APL's cute array-manipulation
>tricks - there may be no way to write it in 'natural' SAS. Between the
>DATA step and IML, SAS can do a lot of computing; but using it just for
>that is not how it was designed, nor what it's good at.
But you can do a lot more with APL than just those things. It is possible
to
write an entire data-entry system in APL, with a reporting system at the
back
end. That's not to say that APL is a good choice for such a system, but
that
*could* be what our erstwhile poster is saddled with. We can't tell for
sure.
We also cannot tell whether any statistical or mathematical matrix magic is
going to be best served with SAS/IML, or if it can be completely replaced
with
one or more stat procs.
However this breaks out, this is unlikely to be a simple
APL-matrix-manipulator -> SAS-matrix-manipulator
translation process.
Just my 0.017 Euros,
David
--
David L. Cassell
mathematical statistician
Design Pathways
3115 NW Norwood Pl.
Corvallis OR 97330
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