Dennis,
The key difference is that with R, you are, as always, dependent upon
volunteers providing software at no charge to you, most of whom have full time
(and then some) jobs. Those jobs (and in many cases, family) will be their
priority, as I am sure is the case with Matt.
Unless they are in a position where their employer specifically allows them to
allocate a percentage of their work time to voluntary projects, like R, you are
at the inevitable mercy of that volunteer's time and priorities.
In the case of Stat/Transfer, they are a profit motivated business with revenue
tied directly to the sales of the application. Thus, they have a very different
perspective on serving their paying customers and can allocate dedicated
resources to the functionality in their application.
An alternative here would be for one of the for profit companies that sell and
support R versions, to take on the task of providing some of these facilities
and providing them back to the community as a service. But, that is up to them
to consider in their overall business plan and the value that they perceive it
brings to their products.
Regards,
Marc Schwartz
On Jan 28, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Dennis Fisher <fis...@plessthan.com> wrote:
> Colleagues
>
> Frank Harrell wrote that “you need to purchase Stat/Transfer", which I did
> many years ago and continue to use.
>
> But I don’t understand why the sas7bdat package (or something equivalent)
> cannot reverse engineer the SAS procedures so that R users can read sas7bdat
> files as well as StatTransfer. I have been in contact with the maintainer,
> Matt Shotwell, regarding bugs in the present version (0.4) and he wrote:
> it tends to languish just one or two items from the top of my TODO... I
> hope to get back to it soon.
> I have also written to this bulletin board about the foreign package not
> being able to process certain SAS XPT files (which StatTransfer handled
> without any problem).
>
> I am a strong advocate of R and I have arranged work-arounds (using
> StatTransfer) in these cases. However, R users would benefit from the
> ability of R to read any SAS file without intermediate software. I would
> offer to participate in any efforts to accomplish this but I think that it is
> beyond my capabilities.
>
> Dennis
>
> Message: 23
> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 13:25:54 -0800 (PST)
> From: Frank Harrell <f.harr...@vanderbilt.edu>
> To: r-help@r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] Handlig large SAS file in R
> Message-ID: <1390857954542-4684250.p...@n4.nabble.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> For that you need to purchase Stat/Transfer.
> Frank
>
>
> hans012 wrote
>> Hey Guys
>> I have a .sas7bdat file of 1.79gb that i want to read.
>> I am using the .sas7bdat package to read the file and after i typed the
>> command read.sas7bdat('filename.sas7bdat') it has been 3 hours with no
>> result so far.
>> Is there a way that i can see the progress of the read?
>> Or is there another way to read the file with less computing time?
>> I do not have access to SAS, the file was sent to me.
>>
>> Let me know what you guys think
>> KR
>> Hans
>
>
> Dennis Fisher MD
> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
> Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
> Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
> www.PLessThan.com
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