SAS on Unix?

[Herb Chong]

In article <645 at bu-cs.UUCP> root at bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:
>Check with SAS, I believe they are currently re-coding their entire
>system from PL/I to C to improve portability. They are also involved
>with (marketing) some new C compiler to help them do this, I believe
>most of that interest had to do with the IBM/370 series machines.

they worked with lattice to develop the C compiler and are marketing it
as a separate product for the various machines that SAS is supported on.
SAS Version 5 is mostly written in C.

>I can't help but suspect that this effort by them has *something* to
>do with running under UNIX.

according to their glossies and SAS Comunnications, the main reason
was that most of SAS is written in PL/I or FORTRAN with a lot of
assembler subroutines and they wanted to standardize on one language
that gave them the power neccessary to do systemy things.  PL/I allows
most of them, but very few systems other than IBM and VMS have a good
PL/I compiler.  they might have chosen modula-2 if compilers had been
more available on more machines.

Herb Chong...

I'm user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....

(will disappear soon)
UUCP:  {decvax|utzoo|ihnp4|allegra|clyde}!watmath!hachong
CSNET: hachong%watmath at waterloo.csnet
ARPA:  hachong%watmath%waterloo.csnet at csnet-relay.arpa