[Python-au] Re: FW: "Whiting, Jenny (INDEX)": Seeking your help

[Jack Andrews]

-- Reinhold wrote:
> What on earth is SAS/BASE? 

SAS/BASE is the core component of the SAS product suite.
  www.sas.com
It's SAS's DBMS and query language (which transmogrified
into a dreadfully cludgey semi-general-purpose language).
SAS is about analysis -- eg. statistical agencies use SAS.

If you have a table 'Customer', you can 
  select Name from Customer
using something like:

data Names;
  use Customer
  keep Name
end data;

... it gets cludgey very quickly using this programming
paradigm ...  but it may just be that I don't know how
to use it properly (but I doubt it <wink>).

You should see 'print' statement.  Like python, SAS puts
a space between things you print and you can alter how many 
spaces like this:

  print a +30 b

so there are 30 spaces between a and b.

If you don't want the space, the only way to get rid of it
is:

  print a +(-1) b

You see this in quite a bit of SAS code.  As far as I could
tell, this is the only way to do any output to stdout or 
a file from SAS.

It's been a year or so since I did about a month of SAS 
programming, but I think I know enough about it to recommend
against using it for anything other than what it's good
for...



Jack.
<me>prepares for barrage of corrections from SAS users</me>


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