And I think your comment gets to the root of my frustration. SAS is great to have for some of the specific tasks it's built to handle, but I don't see it as a programming language, at all. In cases like mine where all you have is SAS, trying to incorporate very basic programming concepts like if/then loops is very cumbersome which means hard-to-read code and lots of mistakes.

I think it's also worth pointing out that SAS trails other options for the biggest data task of all - cleaning and understanding new data sets. Since so much of SAS is based on either point/click or printing out long reports, it takes far longer than it should to even get column names, convert between data types, etc. Here, the issue is a combination of both the 'language' and the IDE options you have for SAS. I can't print to a console, and I can't modify my workspace the way you can with lots of other IDEs.