Amen!!!

Mike Rhoads RhoadsM1@Westat.com

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Quentin McMullen Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 1:51 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: Fun With SAS - My Vote for Oddest SAS Programming Language "Feature"

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Michael Raithel <michaelraithel@westat.com> wrote in part:

> If you can relate to this, let the list know your own vote for the oddest SAS programming language feature.

This is actually one of my favorite interview questions. I sometimes ask it even more broadly, "Is there anything about SAS that you hate? [a construct, a function, a procedure, an option...]" If a candidate has been programming in SAS for more than one or two years and can't come up with an answer, you have to question their critical thinking skills.

One 'feature' that I don't like is that by dafult, ods path is: 1. SASUSER.TEMPLAT(UPDATE) 2. SASHELP.TMPLMST(READ)

To me, this flies in the face of SAS general practice of storing materials in the work library, unless a user asks for them to be stored somewhere else. So by default, datasets, format catalogs, macro catalog, etc. are all stored in the work directory (and understood to be local to the SAS session). But for some reason, someone decided that by default templates should be stored in SASUSER. I think plenty of beginning SAS programmers don't know what/where SASUSER is, don't know that they are accumulating permanent templates in it, don't know why a template defined in one session is magically available in another session, don't know why code that works on their computer (referencing a template sitting in their sasuser directory since last year) does not work on their colleague's computer, etc....

I think it would have been much more SASsy to have the default be: 1. WORK.TEMPLAT(UPDATE) 2. SASHELP.TMPLMST(READ)

[And yes, I know you can change the path, I just think it's a bad default]

Kind Regards, --Quentin