Date:         Wed, 30 Jan 2002 11:17:05 -0500
Reply-To:     Brad.Goldman@AUTOTRADER.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Brad Goldman <Brad.Goldman@AUTOTRADER.COM>
Subject:      Re: www.coronadoviews.com Style and Opinion
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

> The TableTop Rule: if you print out the routine and you can't
> lay it out on
> a table so you can see all of it, then it is tooooo [bleep]ing big.
> So 800/50 = 16 pages.
> reducing it to 700/50 = 14 pages meant only four pages were
> falling off the
> table.

My two cents -- this rules is meaningless.  How big is the table?  Why not
just shrink the font down a couple points?  Use smaller margins?  Run the
pages through a copier on reduce?

Besides the other uses mentioned, "run;" serves the same purpose as white
space.  Someone else looking at code can quickly see where the step
boundaries are and analyze it that much easier.  To truly save space, you
should also get rid of any indenting.  And all those newlines after the
semicolon take up valuable room, all code could be written as title "My
Data";proc print data=x;var x;run;title;  -- saves even more real estate.

Sorry to pile on and exaggerate like this, but I think as others have said,
the amount of lines a SAS program takes up is a very low-order measure of
it's quality.

-Brad Goldman