In reply to David Bruckman.

Yes, the result is the same as if you used a %LET statement. The point of the article is to show how to create a space-separated (or comma-separated) list of values that come from a data set. As you said, if you know that the values are always going to be the same, you can use the %LET statement. This is called knowing the values at "compile time." However, sometimes you don't know the values until run time. In that case, you need to read the values from a data set by using the technique in this article.