#sas

After playing around with pycco I decided to give a go of creating a custom one for SAS. When applying pycco onto SAS, you will run into strange formatting since when you have: some sas code /*a comment*/ you would expect the comment to reference that line of code. pycco handles this correctly. In comparison since SAS doesn’t have a concept of “functions” (yes there are macros, but lets ignore that for a moment). [Read More]

I’ve been debating whether by statement should be retained in Stan. This is quite easily my least favourite “feature” of SAS. The modern methodology of “split-apply-combine” in R and Pandas is far superior and easier to read compared with the many hacks which come along. For example: data class; set sashelp.class; by sex; /*just pretend its been sorted...*/ retain cumulative_age name_list; if first.sex then do; cumulative_age = 0; name_list = ''; end; cumulative_age = cumulative_age + age; name_list = catx(', ', name); if last. [Read More]

So I’ve just released v0.01-alpha of my SAS transcompiler to Python (Stan). Here is just a list of things I’ve learnt : SAS very similar to a PL\0 language by statements are inferior to the split-apply-combine strategy pyparsing makes life very easy (compared with dealing with lots of regex) iPython magics are ridiculously easy to write writing Python packages isn’t that hard, but there is a lot of extraneous options Some of the (many) things which are missing: [Read More]