Certainly true. In particular, SAS was designed from to store data items on disk, and to read into core memory the minimum needed for a particular calculation.
The kind of data SAS handles is (for the most part) limited to rectangular arrays, similar to R data frames. In many procedures they can be read from disk sequentially (row by row), which undoubtedly simplifies memory handling. It seems logical to suppose that in developing SAS, algorithms were chosen to support that style of memory management. Finally, the style of writing programs in SAS consists of discrete steps of computation, between which nothing but the program need be held in core memory. "Gabor Grothendieck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think SAS was developed at a time when computer memory was > much smaller than it is now and the legacy of that is its better > usage of computer resources. > > On 4/10/07, Wensui Liu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Greg, > > As far as I understand, SAS is more efficient handling large data > > probably than S+/R. Do you have any idea why? -- Mike Prager, NOAA, Beaufort, NC * Opinions expressed are personal and not represented otherwise. * Any use of tradenames does not constitute a NOAA endorsement. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.