Happy Pi Day! Every year on March 14th (written 3/14 in the US), people in the mathematical sciences celebrate all things pi-related because 3.14 is the three-decimal approximation to π ≈ 3.14159265358979.... Pi is a mathematical constant defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference (C) to its diameter (D).
Tag: SAS Programming
I recently wrote about the Number-Word Game, which is an iterative algorithm that generates a sequence of natural numbers by using the lengths of the words for the numbers. In English, the words are "one", "two", "three", and so on. You can play the Number-Word Game in any alphabetic language
Have you heard about the Number-Word Game? This is a simple game that has the following rules: Start with any positive integer. Write down the English word for the integer. Count the number of letters in the word. This gives a new positive integer. Go to (2). Repeat until a
I sometimes see analysts overuse colors in statistical graphics. My rule of thumb is that you do not need to use color to represent a variable that is already represented in a graph. For example, it is redundant to use a continuous color ramp to represent the lengths of bars
This phenomenon has been in the news recently, so I've updated this article that I originally published in 2017. The paper currency in circulation in the US is mostly $100 bills. And not just by a little bit -- these account for 34% of the notes by denomination and nearly
How to calculate a leap year in SAS - the easy way!
The SAS extension for VS Code supports SAS syntax and programming, and can connect to almost all SAS environments.
A SAS programmer wanted to find the name of the variable for each row that contains the largest value. This task is useful for wide data sets in which each observation has several variables that are measured on the same scale. For example, each observation in the data might represent
Transitioning from SAS9 to SAS Viya can be uncertain for SAS programmers. Whether your organization is making the move and you’re curious about your current SAS analytical workflows, or you're contemplating moving to SAS Viya and concerned about its impact on your SAS expertise and programs. The hesitation is understandable.
Use SAS DATA step to split a large binary file into smaller pieces, which can help with file upload operations,
In a previous article, I presented some of the most popular blog posts from 2023. The popular articles tend to discuss elementary topics that have broad appeal. However, I also wrote many technical articles about advanced topics. The following articles didn't make the Top 10 list, but they deserve a
In 2023, I wrote 90 articles for The DO Loop blog. My most popular articles were about SAS programming, data visualization, and statistics. In addition, several "general interest" articles were popular, including my article for Pi Day and an article about AI chatbots. If you missed any of these articles,
Sometimes it is helpful to display a table of statistics directly on a graph. A simple example is displaying the number of observations and the mean or median on a histogram. In SAS, the term inset is used to describe a table that is displayed on a graph. This article
It has been more than a decade since SAS 9.3 changed the default ODS destination from the old LISTING destination to more modern destinations such as HTML. One of the advantages of modern output destinations is support for Unicode symbols, superscripts, subscripts, and for formatting text by using boldface, italics,
Part of the power of the SAS ODS system is the ability to visualize data by using ODS templates. An ODS template describes how to render data as a table or as a graph. A lot of papers and documentation have been written about how to define a custom template
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, video presentations and webcasts have become a regular routine for many of us. On days that I will be using my webcam, I wear a solid-color shirt. If I don't plan to be on camera, I can wear a pinstripe Oxford shirt. Why the difference?
SAS expert Leonid Batkhan presents the %embed macro function as a way to embed both “foreign” and SAS native code from a file into a SAS program, preventing clutter in your code.
Recently, I learned about an elementary programming assignment called the FizzBuzz program. Some companies use this assignment for the first round of interviews with potential programmers. A competent programmer can write FizzBuzz in 5-10 minutes, which leaves plenty of time to discuss other topics. If an applicant can't complete the
A previous article discusses how to compute the union, intersection, and other subsets of a pair of sets. In that article, I displayed a simple Venn diagram (reproduced to the right) that illustrates the intersection and difference between two sets. The diagram uses a red disk for one set, a
The fundamental operations on sets are union, intersection, and set difference, all of which are supported directly in the SAS IML language. While studying another programming language, I noticed that the language supports an additional operation, namely the symmetric difference between two sets. The language also supports query functions to
A data analyst wanted to estimate the correlation between two variables, but he was concerned about the influence of a confounding variable that is correlated with them. The correlation might affect the apparent relationship between main two variables in the study. A common confounding variable is age because young people
This article is about how to use Git to share SAS programs, specifically how to share libraries of SAS IML functions. Some IML programmers might remember an earlier way to share libraries of functions: SAS/IML released "packages" in SAS 9.4m3 (2015), which enable you to create, document, share, and use
SAS supports the ColorBrewer system of color palettes from the ColorBrewer website (Brewer and Harrower, 2002). The ColorBrewer color ramps are available in SAS by using the PALETTE function in SAS IML software. The PALETTE function supports all ColorBrewer palettes, but some palettes are not interpretable by people with color
Many experienced SAS programmers use the PUT statement to write messages to the log from a DATA step. But did you know that SAS supports the PUTLOG function, which is another way to write a message to the log? I use the PUTLOG statement in the DATA step for the
The addition of the PYTHON procedure and Python editor in SAS Viya enables users to execute Python code in SAS Studio. This new capability in SAS Viya adds another tool to SAS's existing collection. With this addition I thought, how can I utilize this new found power? In this example,
Welcome back to my SAS Users blog series CAS Action! - a series on fundamentals. If you'd like to start by learning more about the distributed CAS server and CAS actions, please see CAS Actions and Action Sets - a brief intro. Otherwise, let's learn how to rename columns in CAS tables.
In this SAS administration tutorial Leonid Batkhan presents various SAS programming solutions on how to identify and prevent duplicate LIBREFs in SAS 9 metadata.
Every year, I write a special article for Halloween in which I show a SAS programming TRICK that is a real TREAT! This year, the trick is to concatenate two strings into a single string in a way that guarantees you can always recover the original strings. I learned this
Have you ever typed your credit card into an online order form and been told that you entered the wrong number? Perhaps you wondered, "How do they know that the numbers I typed do not make a valid credit card number?" The answer is that credit card numbers and other
The correlations between p variables are usually displayed by using a symmetric p x p matrix of correlations. However, sometimes you might prefer to see the correlations listed in "long form" as a three-column table, as shown to the right. In this table, each row shows a pair of variables and the