R or SAS? Why is SAS preferred?

[Sparsh Verma]

Hi,

I know and learned R but these days it seems that companies are rather interested in SAS and experience with it. Do you know that there some advantages of SAS over...what might be the advantages of SAS over R?

[Robert Sample]

SAS has been around a long time (since the early 70's) and runs on a wide variety of platforms. Many companies are leery of open software due to questions about support and getting problems fixed. SAS has excellent support.

[Mr Awasthi]

I have heard that most of them use SAS because if they make mistakes due to software bugs and it comes to lawsuits, SAS will recompensate them. R does not come up with any such warranty.

[William Collins]

SAS is multi-platform, including the Mainframe. R you'd have to port to the Mainframe yourself (or find someone who has already done it) and then convince your management and all management hierarchies that rely on the output that it would be OK to use R and hope for the best rather than SAS and a support contract.

The idea of what you have heard is tangentially this, but it is a pretty silly and obscure way to express it.

[Robert Sample]

As far as I know, SAS offers no such warranty. My use of SAS goes back to 1977 and has been with several different companies (I also have experience with SPSS and R but haven't really done anything with BMDP). They selected SAS for various reasons but not because they are protected from legal actions by using SAS. With statistical software, accuracy of results is a concern and SAS has excelled at accurate processing over the years. SAS has also expanded the product to include a variety of functions.