Date:         Mon, 10 Feb 1997 23:21:23 +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: FW: concatenation error
Comments: To: "Rickards, Clinton S" <RickardsCS@AETNA.COM>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

On Mon, 10 Feb 1997, "Rickards, Clinton S" <RickardsCS@AETNA.COM> replied to
my comments with:
 
>In addition, the variables VAR1-VAR4 are numeric. This should force
>character/numeric conversion in the concatenation since concatenation
>only works on character data.
 
Sure Clint, but as Maria said, she was deliberately invoking implicit
conversion and was therefore expecting the first ('Numeric to character')
conversion message, but not the second;  she did not realise that her
variable 'newvar' had defaulted to being numeric because of the order of
program statements.
 
Regards,
 
John
 
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