In reply to Tania Walton.

Thank you, Tania, for your input. Kudos to those companies that already achieve this in their set up macros. My goal was to present and popularize this technique for a broader audience.

I wholeheartedly agree with you on the necessity of embedding into macros comprehensive and descriptive ERROR/ALERT/WARNING messages. I routinely use the following generalized technique, e.g.:

%macro ABC(indata=);
...
%if not %sysfunc(fileexist(&indata)) %then
%do;
%put ***MACRO &SYSMACRONAME: Source data &indata does not exist. Macro stops its execution.;
%return;
%end;
...
%mend ABC;

But this is an entirely different topic...