I have had to spend more time than I like with SAS lately. Over the 15 years since I first had to deal with SAS, the most enjoyable part of the experience has been to complain about it.
Given the time and opportunity, I can find a zillion things to complain about SAS.
However, I want to point out something I like about it this time.
See, SAS was designed from the ground up to deal with data sets that do not fit in available memory.
It has a DATA step that processes the data set one observation at a time.
Its principle similar to using:
while ( <> ) {
# ...
}instead of
for ( <> ) {
# ...
}Having used SAS before I learned Perl, I never had a problem with gratuitously slurping input.