SAS professionals invest time and energy in improving their fluency with the broad range of capabilities SAS software has to offer. However, the computer programming field is not limited to SAS alone and it behooves the professional to be well rounded in his or her skill sets. One of the most interesting contenders in the field of analytics is the open source R software. Due to its range of applications and the fact that it is free, more organizations are considering how to incorporate it into their operations and many people are already seeing its use incorporated into project requirements. As such, it is now common to need to move code between R and SAS, a process which is not inherently seamless.

This paper serves as a basic tutorial on some of the most critical functions in R and shows their parallel in SAS to aid in the translation process…