In reply to Peter Lancashire.

That is a good idea. I wish that error messages were written so clearly that they would be self-documenting.

I won't defend the status quo, but I will mention a few relevant points to let you know why your suggestion is a big job. SAS has many thousands of error messages, most of which occur only rarely. Furthermore, some error messages are issued by subroutines in a math or utility library that is used by dozens of procedures, so it's not clear where to document those messages. Furthermore, error messages are translated into dozens of local languages (German, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, etc), so a Web search would only help the English speakers.

I will look into adding a section of the SAS/IML doc that describes common error messages that arise in practice. In my experience, there are 10-12 that appear 90% of the time, so that seems like a good place to start.

To answer your last question, SAS has a user-feedback ballot for software improvements that is read by developers. You might suggest your idea to the "SAS Procedures" community.