SAS Facts
A SAS program looks like this:
System options...
(For example: options ps=66 ls=80;)
Any combination of DATA steps and/or PROC steps.
(The example program in the SAS Field Guide has one DATA step and three PROC steps.)
Roughly, we can say that SAS is made up by only two kinds of steps: DATA steps
and PROC steps. Each step is in turn made up of a sequence of statements.
DATA steps may include statements directing SAS to create one or
more new SAS datasets. The DATA step begins with a DATA statement and
can include any number of program statements. Report writing, file
management, and information retrieval are all included in DATA steps.
PROC steps direct SAS to call a procedure from its library and
to execute that procedure, usually with a SAS dataset as input. The
PROC step begins with a PROC statement. Other statements in the PROC
step give the program more information about the results that you
want.
Rules for SAS statements:
- SAS statements end with a semicolon(;).
- SAS statements are not case sensitive.
- SAS programs can be freely formatted: Any number of SAS statements
can appear on a single line. A SAS statement can be continued from
one line to the next, as long as no word is split. SAS statements
can begin in any column.
- Words in SAS statements are separated by blanks or by special characters (e.g. =, +, *).
Rules for SAS names:
- A SAS name can contain at most 32 characters (8 character for versions
of SAS prior to version 7).
- The first letter must be a letter or an underscore(_). Subsequent
characters can be letters, numbers, or underscores.
- SAS names are not case sensitive.
Please send questions or suggestions about this web page to beatnic@aset.psu.edu
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