A little-known but useful feature of SAS/IML 12.3 (which was released with SAS 9.4) is the ability to generate a vector of lowercase or uppercase letters by using the colon operator (:). Many SAS/IML programmers use the colon operator to generate a vector of sequential integers: proc iml; x =
Last week, as part of an article on how spammers generate comments for blogs, I showed how to generate random messages by using the CATX function in the DATA step. In that example, the strings were scalar quantities, but you can also concatenate vectors of strings in the SAS/IML language.
SAS programmers are probably familiar with how SAS stores a character variable in a data set, but how is a character vector stored in the SAS/IML language? Recall that a character variable is stored by using a fixed-width storage structure. In the SAS DATA step, the maximum number of characters
