For those making “the big switch” from a foreign software to R. That page is intended to contain some useful information for users of other statistical packages that want to move to R.

• From SAS to R
• From Octave or Matlab to R
• From S-PLUS to R
• From SPSS to R
• From Stata to R
• Using Maxima and R
• From Mathematica to R

Of interest here might be a technical report Strategically using General Purpose Statistics Packages: A Look at Stata, SAS and SPSS written by UCLA ATS Statistical Consulting Group. There is also a section on R, which some have suspected damns R with faint praise. This was the reason for reply R Relative to Statistical Packages: Comment 1 on Technical Report ..., where one can find some “facts” about R and R in comparison to other statistical programs. Highly recommended!

For interchange of code, you may want to follow Pr. Harrell’s advice:

 > library(fortunes)
 > fortune('SAS-code into R')
 Jim Gustafsson: I would like to put my SAS-code into R. Could I do that, if
 yes, how?
 Frank Harrell: Just reverse the procedure you use when you put R code into
 SAS. ;)
   -- Jim Gustafsson and Frank Harrell
      R-help (February 2004)

— Romain François 2006/03/04