I'm not sure what point you're attempting to make. The SAS/IML language is a language in which you can pass matrices (which includes vectors) to functions and get back similar quantities. You can manipulate these matrices with Level 3 and Level 2 BLAS. This basic paradigm of dealing with high-level quantities(matrices and vectors) rather than scalar quantities is what makes languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R convenient languages for statistical programming and for developing algorithms.