Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 12:14:48 +0000
Reply-To: John Whittington <johnw@MAG-NET.CO.UK>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From: John Whittington <johnw@MAG-NET.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: Data Step Code tools soapbox (was Re: Checking for Numeric
or...)
On Thu, 22 Feb 1996, Karsten Self <karsten@NEWAGE1.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>I'd like to suggest a list of suggested informational/code development
>tools that I would like to see in SAS DATA step processing. Additions
>are welcome.
[ piles of very good stuff snipped ]
I would like to throw my support fully behind all of Karsten's suggestions;
there are not of these suggested features that I could not make valuable use
of at times. The desire for user-defined functions is a particularly common
cry of mine, not the least becuase I see it as a way of avoiding some
macros - and, as most of you know, I *hate* the SAS macro facility!
Just one point, which I've already pointed out to Karsten,
> 3. determine the number of variables
>
> array var(*) _all_ ;
> nvar= dim(var);
does not work when there is a mixture of numeric and character variables.
One has to determine the number of each separately (using _numeric_ and
_character_ instead of _all) and then add the numbers together - so even
more reasons for a direct method of doing this. I do suspect, however, that
in preactice one is more likely to want to know the separate totals for
numeric and character vars.
John
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