Date:         Fri, 31 Mar 2006 03:25:49 -0000
Reply-To:     sa polo <solouga5@rediffmail.com>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         sa polo <solouga5@REDIFFMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Help needed with some SAS interview questions!
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

  
Hi All,

I am preparing for a SAS interview and i have a few questions to which i do not know the answers, would someone please help me out .

1) Under what circumstances would you code a SELECT construct instead of IF statements?

2) What is the one statement to set the criteria of data that can be coded in any step?

3)What is the effect of the OPTIONS statement ERRORS=1?

4)What's the difference between VAR A1 - A4 and VAR A1 -- A4 ?

5)Identify statements whose placement in the DATA step is critical.

6)Name statements that function at both compile and execution time.

7)Does SAS 'Translate' (compile) or does it 'Interpret'? Explain.

8)Name statements that function at both compile and execution time.

9)What does the RUN statement do?

10)Why is SAS considered self-documenting?

11)What are some good SAS programming practices for processing very large data sets?

12)What are some problems you might encounter in processing missing values?
 In Data steps? Arithmetic? Comparisons? Functions? Classifying data?

13)What is the different between functions and PROCs that calculate the same simple descriptive statistics?

14)If you were told to create many records from one record, show how you would do this using arrays and with PROC
TRANSPOSE?

15)What is a method for assigning first.VAR and last.VAR to the BY group variable on unsorted data?

16)What is the order of application for output data set options, input data set options and SAS statements?

17)What is the order of evaluation of the comparison operators: + - * / ** ( ) ?

18)How do you debug and test your SAS programs?

19)How can you put a “trace” in your program?

20)Have you ever used the SAS Debugger?

21)What other SAS features do you use for error trapping and data validation?

22)How would you combine 3 or more tables with different structures?

All help is much appreciated as usual.

Thanks,
Sa Polo