The other day I encountered the following SAS DATA step for generating three normally distributed variables. Study it, and see if you can discover what is unnecessary (and misleading!) about this program: data points; drop i; do i=1 to 10; x=rannor(34343); y=rannor(12345); z=rannor(54321); output; end; run; The program creates the
So many of us struggle with this mountain. In fact, 68.27% of us get within sight of reaching the summit (while 95.47% of us are at least on a perceivable slope). We run, walk, crawl and sometimes slide our way uphill (from one direction or the other) until we finally
Statistical programmers often need mathematical constants such as π (3.14159...) and e (2.71828...). Programmers of numerical algorithms often need to know machine-specific constants such as the machine precision constant (2.22E-16 on my Windows PC) or the largest representable double-precision value (1.798E308 on my Windows PC). Some computer languages build these
