Date:         Mon, 30 Aug 1999 07:45:56 +1000
Reply-To:     Tim Churches <tchur@bigpond.com>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Tim Churches <tchur@BIGPOND.COM>
Subject:      More on SI's answer to S Plus (and R)?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Tim Churches <tchur@BIGPOND.COM> writes:
> ... Stata is another package which positively encourages
> the writing of new functions by users - much of the power and popularity
of
> Stata is due to its library of user-written functions (or ADO's as Stata
> calls them).

For an example of the Stata way of doing things, see
http://www.stata.com/info/products/stb/stbcontents.html

STB stands for "Stata Technical Bulletin", which has an editorial board of
eminent statisticians and epidemiologists which reviews submissions of
user-written extensions to Stata and compiles them into a bulletin. This
bulletin is then distributed to all Stata users via email, floppy disc or
Stata itself can download them automatically. In other words, Stata
positively embraces extensions not written by Stata Corporation.

SI's version of this, the SAS File Contribution Server, is a passive
facility which is not even hosted by SI itself (it is hosted by a university
on an FTP server which refuses connections to users behind many corporate
firewalls).

Now, if SI were smart, it would start offering inducements (not necessarily
financial, but that probably wouldn't hurt) to the users who contribute code
to Stata, S Plus and R to port their code to SAS, either as SAS/Toolkit
PROCs or as SAS/IML or Base SAS macros. But I don't think that is SI's
style.

Tim Churches