Why SAS?¶
Writing code in SAS can be frustrating. It is likely not the type of statistical programming language you are accustomed to using. Programs like Stata and R store data in random access memory (RAM) — SAS operates on a single row of data at a time. This is what makes SAS useful for working with large datasets — you do not have to read the full file into memory.
In Stata, you can use other parts of the data to inform “row-level” operations. For example, if you have a variable \(x\) and you want to generate
you can use the egen function to attach \(\overline{x}\) as a wide variable or simply summarize \(x\) and difference out the mean using the stored macro. Conversely, SAS cannot compute the sample mean, \(\overline{x}\), in a standard DATA step operation (more on this later) because it only has a single line of the data held in memory. A simple way to think about SAS is as a for-loop executing commands on each row of the data:
forval i = 1/_N {
replace x = x + 1 if _n == `i'
}
The SAS programmer is required to write linear and purposeful code because of this “row-by-row functionality.” This forces you to think through every operation you are asking SAS to perform. That is why SAS is like spinach.
It might not taste good, but “SAS is good for you” - Angrist.