First, appreciate this article, the importance of creating "readable" SAS programs and the comments submitted on this topic so far. As a long time programmer/developer in SAS and many other programming languages as I'm sure many others are as well, there are some fundamentals for writing good programs that should always be adhere too regardless of if you're writing in SAS, Java, Javascript, etc., including: 1. Assume you're not always going to be the person having to run, maintain, etc. the program, so write it as such that someone else can easily understand it. 2. Comments are a good thing, especially if you're doing some type of complex calculation, operation, do-loop, etc. This has saved me more than a few times when I developed some very clever code and then had to modify it a couple of years later. 3. White space, indenting, etc. really helps the general "readability" of code. 4. This more of a Program Editor note, but incredibly help...use the color coding functionality of the SAS Editor to highlight different functions, data types, etc. I have the background color change for Comments and String variables and it's amazing how easy it is to notice you're missing a tick mark, semi-colon or end of comment (*/) mark when your whole program changes color :) 5. Make variable names meaningful...yes, it's a few extra keystrokes, but the ability to quickly and easily understand the meaning of a variable is invaluable. (e.g. "X" vs. "LastName")