World Programming System: An Alternative to SAS

In an earlier post, I was mentioning two ways to reduce the SAS licence costs. The first one, Carolina, consists of translating the SAS code into Java code. However, it seems not very easy to do and the solution is not known (and thus there is no real support for it). Another solution is to interpret your SAS code using the World Programming System (WPS).

WPS is a SAS code interpreter. The main advantage of WPS is that the licence cost is much cheaper. Also, you don’t need to change your code too much (see below). This is, to my knowledge, the easiest way to make a SAS program run without using SAS. However, since WPS has some issues reading/writing .sas7bdat format, it is advised to use their own format (it is easy to transform from .sas7bdat to WPS format). WPS has its own editor which is even better than Enterprise Guide 4.2, at least for coding/debugging. Similarly to SAS, WPS support team is very helpful and professional.

However, running a SAS program within WPS is not straightforward. Here is a list of issues I had when executing my SAS code with WPS:

• Can’t update a data set in the SAS format (need to use the WPS format)
• Unknown fdelete function
• Unable to use ODS PDF option
• noquotelenmax is not supported
• Cannot use SYSTASK
• Format is8601dt can’t be read

For information, I’m using SAS 9.2 and I tried WPS 2.4. Finally, keep in mind that WPS can interpret SAS code, but it is not (yet) able to read Enterprise Miner generated code, for example.

For more information: World Programming System (WPS).

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