Wrote a new library - Comments and suggestions please!

[Jon Clements]

On Sep 27, 6:33 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Robert Kern wrote:
> > On 9/27/11 10:24 AM, Tal Einat wrote:
> >> I don't work with SAS so I have no reason to invest any time developing
> >> for it.
>
> >> Also, as far as I can tell, SAS is far from free or open-source, meaning
> >> I definitely am not interested in developing for it.
>
> > I don't think he's suggesting that you drop what you are doing in Python
> > and start working with SAS. He is suggesting that you look at the similar
> > procedures that exist in the SAS standard library for inspiration.
>
> Yeah, inspiration on what *not* to do.
>
> I googled on "SAS PROC FREQ" and found this:
>
> http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/procstat/63104/HTML/defau...
>
> All the words are in English, but I have no idea what the function does, how
> you would call it, and what it returns. Would it have been so hard to show
> a couple of examples?
>
> Documentation like that really makes me appreciate the sterling work done on
> Python's docs.
>
> This tutorial:
>
> http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi30/263-30.pdf
>
> is much clearer.
>
> --
> Steven

Yes - I definitely do not like the SAS docs - in fact, when I last had
to "buy" the product, it was something like £5k for the "BASE" system,
then if I wanted ODBC it was another £900, and the "proper" manuals
were something stupid like another £1k (and only in hard copy) - this
was a good 5/6 years ago though... (oh, and for a very basic course,
it was £1.2k a day for staff to train) *sighs* [oh, and if I wanted a
'site' licence, we were talking 6 digits]

Anyway, Robert Kern correctly interpreted me. I was not suggesting to
the OP that he move to SAS (heaven forbid), I was indeed suggesting
that he look into what similar systems have (that I have experience
with and appreciate), and he acknowledges that is not present in
Python, and ummm, take inspiration and quite possibly "rip 'em off".

A decent tabulate/cross-tabulation and statistics related there-to
library is something I'd be willing to assist with and put time into.

Cheers,

Jon.