There's no denying that prior knowledge of SAS is a sine qua non.

-----Original Message----- From: Ian Whitlock [mailto:WHITLOI1@WESTAT.COM] Sent: Friday, October 17, 2003 1:35 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: to Ian regarding %GOTO and how long to wait to delve into M ACRO

In part Dianne wrote:

-----Original Message----- From: Dianne Rhodes Sent: Friday, October 17, 2003 11:31 AM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: to Ian regarding %GOTO and how long to wait to delve into M ACRO

> >> From: Igor Kurbeko [mailto:ikurbeko@ATHEROGENICS.COM] >> P.S. As for Dianne citation >>> 'I for one have over 20 years of >>> SAS experience, but I have only been using >>> Macro for the last eight or so' > >> I doubt that macro maven Ron Fehd >> would have ever achieved this title by following these 'rules'. >

Gosh and by golly - that wasn't supposed to be a rule!! Learning SAS first is the rule.

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As I see it, suppose you were offered a SAS programming job to write a program to generate Russian novels. You probably wouldn't do very well if you know no any Russian.

I have taught many macro classes in the last 10 years. I would say that in general the single biggest deterrent to learning was the fact that many of the students didn't know enough about SAS to know what sort of SAS program to generate. There was one exception, a student who knew almost no SAS but was a very sharp C programmer. He was one of the best students I had when it came to understanding the why principles, but of course he had a great deal of trouble with SAS syntax when it came to exercises, although he did pick up the macro syntax from the lectures pretty well.

IanWhitlock@westat.com