In reply to Rick Wicklin.

It's a nice idea we have had! In practice, I think we will soon run into problems with missing values. A numeric TYPE variable with missing values will kill everything dead as missing values are invalid input into DESIGN, also your descriptive statistics will be calculated using the wrong counts if the MPG variable has missing values.

Should the DESIGN function have an option to allow a missing category? Should there be a TABULTATE function designed specifically for 1-way and 2-way tabulations?