There are two programming tools that I rarely use: the SAS macro language and recursion. The SAS macro language is a tool that enables you to generate SAS statements. I rarely use the SAS macro language because the SAS IML language supports all the functionality required to write complex programs,
The SAS IML Language has a quirk with regards to functions that take no arguments. As discussed in the documentation, "modules with arguments are given a local symbol table." This is the usual behavior that programmers expect. However, the documentation goes on to state that "a module that has no
In SAS, the easiest way to draw random sampling from data is to use PROC SURVEYSELECT or the SAMPLE function in SAS IML software. I have previously written about how to implement four common sampling schemes by using PROC SURVEYSELECT and the SAMPLE function. The DATA step in SAS is
Just like the SAS DATA step, the SAS IML language supports both functions and subroutines. A function returns a value, so the calling syntax is familiar: y = func(x1, x2); /* the function returns one value, y */ In this syntax, the input arguments are x1 and x2. The
A previous article discusses the fact that there are often multiple ways in SAS to obtain the same result. This fact results in many vigorous discussions on online programming forums as people propose different (but equivalent) methods for solving someone's problem then argue why their preferred method is better than
A previous article discusses a formula for a confidence interval for R-square in a linear regression model (Olkin and Finn (1995) "Correlations redux", Psychological Bulletin) The formula is useful for large data sets, but should be used with caution for small samples. At the end of the previous article, I
Sometimes labels for variables get "dropped" during data preparation and cleaning. One example is when data are transposed from "wide form" to "long form." For example, suppose a data set has three variables, X, Y, and Z, each with labels. If you transpose the data to long form, the new
A SAS programmer wanted to estimate a proportion and a confidence interval (CI), but didn't know which SAS procedure to call. He knows a formula for the CI from an elementary statistics textbook. If x is the observed count of events in a random sample of size n, then the
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).
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
