Dammit Jim!

I’ve been meaning to write up a bit on using macros in SAS to complement my previous post on macro variables for quite a while. Luckily Norwegian guy reminded me about the pain of starting programming in SAS and provided me some motivation. So here’s my take on using macros in programming.

I just thought I’d do a quick post about SAS macro variables. They’re a pretty important part of SAS but when I had just started people told me not to worry about them and to just enter values by hand. After I finally got tired of constantly looking up results and entering them into programs over and over again, I decided I had better figure out how real programmers did it. As a side note, I’ve had a couple people tell me SAS was dying out but I see it appears to be in the top 20 of programming languages so I guess it’s going strong.