Funigirls: A Prototype Functional Programming Language for the Analysis of Generalized Linear Models

Statistical analysis is most readily carried out with the aid of a statistical package; there are of course numerous well-established packages, most now available both in main-frame and micro (usually IBM PC compatible) formats. In addition to routine analyses, the professional statistician will also wish to develop his/her own procedures. This necessitates either the use of a package with some form of programming facility (looping, branching, etc.), or the use of a high level language. Both approaches suffer from disadvantages. Packages tend not to be designed with the aim of extensibility in mind; thus even with the most powerful package ‘languages’ (e.g. SAS, GLIM), programming is something of an adventure (and an unstructured one at that). An illustration is the widespread industry of writing GLIM macros to bend the GLIM program into the analysis of models outside the standard GLM framework. Such programming can be very tricky, numerous publications result, but try understanding someone else’s macros!