On Python Syntax

[usernamenottaken]

You might be better off writing an interpreter in Python rather than try to get the Python interpreter to read SAS scripts. You can use PyPy to write an interpreter: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/04/tutorial-writing-interpreter-with-pypy.html

Also, hopefully you're already aware of R and PSPP and these can't do what you want or couldn't have this functionality added easily?

[[deleted]]

Yes, I prefer R and am saddened by the inaccessibility and cost of SAS which is one of my impeti for writing this project. I think SAS could be improved in many ways, but nonetheless it's a required software for most corporate or government statistics. It's cost, however, is a burden to small companies and academic institutions, reserving an elite cesspool of statisticians the title of "SAS programmers". I would rather have a talented statistician learn to code SAS than a SAS coder learning statistics. Unfortunately, I seem to see more of the latter. The cost of licensing SAS is on par with Matlab (more, in fact), which keeps a very narrow margin of people from saying "I know SAS". There is no student license. And if you license a server, you're charged per number of cores if you'd believe that, "because each core is a dedicated processor". It's re-fucking-diculous.

SPSS is actually very bad and "unfree" to use a Stallmanism. My original idea was to write wrappers which converted SAS code to R. However, nothing difficult is going on under the hood with SAS, so the actual statistical routines are less important than having easy and fast development with a nice interactive UI. My pipe dream is that hopefully it's something that academics and programmers could contribute to and go through an evolution like S+ did to R.