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R Interface Now Available in SAS/IML® Studio

SAS/IML Studio (formerly known as SAS Stat Studio) provides the capability to interface with the R language. If you already have SAS 9.2 or later (Base SAS®, SAS/STAT®, and SAS/IML®) installed, you can download the latest release of SAS/IML Studio. Installations of SAS 9.2 and later will include SAS/IML Studio 3.3 with SAS/IML from this point forward. Documentation can be found in the chapter "Calling Functions in the R Language" in SAS/IML Studio 14.2 for SAS/STAT Users.

“R is a leading language for developing new statistical methods,” said Bob Rodriguez, Senior Director of Statistical Development at SAS. “Our new PhD developers learned R in their graduate programs and are quite versed in it.”

R is a matrix-based programming language that allows you to program statistical methods reasonably quickly. It's open source software, and many add-on packages for R have emerged, providing statisticians with convenient access to new research. Many new statistical methods are first programmed in R.

While SAS is committed to providing the new statistical methodologies that the marketplace demands and will deliver new work more quickly with a recent decoupling of the analytical product releases from Base SAS, a commercial software vendor can only put out new work so fast. And never as as fast as a professor and a grad student writing an academic implementation of brand-new methodology.

Both R and SAS are here to stay, and finding ways to make them work better with each other is in the best interests of our customers.

“We know a lot of our users have both R and SAS in their toolkit, and we decided to make it easier for them to access R by making it available in the SAS environment,” said Rodriguez.

The SAS/IML Studio interface allows you to integrate R functionality with SAS/IML or SAS programs. You can also exchange data between SAS and R as data sets or matrices.

“This is just the first step,” said Radhika Kulkarni, Vice President of Advanced Analytics. “We are busy working on an R interface that can be surfaced in the SAS server or via other SAS clients. In the future, users will be able to interface with R through the IML procedure.“