Patrick Burns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I have had an email conversation with the author of the > technical report from which the quote was taken. I am > formulating a comment to the report that will be posted > with the technical report. > > I would be pleased if this thread continued, so I will know > better what I want to say. Plus I should be able to reference > this thread in the comment.
One thing that is often overlooked, and hasn't yet been mentioned in the thread, is how much *simpler* R can be for certain completely basic tasks of practical or pedagogical relevance: Calculate a simple derived statistic, confidence intervals from estimate and SE, percentage points of the binomial distribution - using dbinom or from the formula, take the sum of each of 10 random samples from a set of numbers, etc. This is where other packages get stuck in the procedure+dataset mindset. For much the same reason, those packages make you tend to treat practical data analysis as something distinct from theoretical understanding of the methods: You just don't use SAS or SPSS or Stata to illustrate the concept of a random sample by setting up a small simulation study as the first thing you do in a statistics class, whereas you could quite conceivably do it in R. (What *is* the equivalent of rnorm(25) in those languages, actually?) Even when using SAS in teaching, I sometimes fire up R just to calculate simple things like pbar <- (p1+p2)/2 sqrt(pbar*(1-pbar)) which you need to cheat SAS Analyst's sample size calculator to work with proportions rather than means. SAS leaves you no way to do this short of setting up a new data set. The Windows calculator will do it, of course, but the students can't see what you are doing then. -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Ă˜ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907 ______________________________________________ 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