In my (fairly extensive) experience the variance in the quality of code
produced by statisticians is quite high. :-)

Jonathan

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010 17:27:47 -0500, oloolo <dynamicpanel@YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>OT: why so many ppl claim that statisticians are bad SAS programmers? What
>are their sample sizes? After all, SAS was written by Statisticians, LOL
>
>On Mon, 4 Jan 2010 17:07:59 -0500, Jonathan Goldberg
><jgoldberg@BIOMEDSYS.COM> wrote:
>
>>I gave an (and who knows, maybe the) explanation in a post on the old
>>thread before I noticed this new one.  For ease of reference, here it is
>>again.
>>---------------------------------------
>>This is a hoary question.  Logically speaking, having x < 2500 resolve to
>>true when x is missing is absurd, and having x = y resolve to true when
>>both x and y are missing is ludicrous.  Missing means "I don't know."  If
>>x and y are heights, you are claiming that you know that two heights are
>>equal when you don't know what either of them is.
>>
>>It's done that way to spare unsophisticated programmers (such as
>>statisticians :-)) from having to deal with three-valued logic.  That is,
>>logical operators can return three values: true, false, and null.  In
>>three valued logic the only operation that can return true or false when
>>dealing with a null value is "is null."
>>