topic Re: why result is 1 for %put %eval( 1000.1 LE 1000.1);? in SAS Programming

why result is 1 for %put %eval( 1000.1 LE 1000.1);?

ZRick — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:10:39 GMT

%put %eval( 1000.1 LE 1000.1);

how does sas treat 1000.1 in this case?

Why it becomes 1 when running sas.

Re: why result is 1 for %put %eval( 1000.1 LE 1000.1);?

ballardw — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:19:34 GMT

%EVAL generally only understands integers. The comparison value of the LE statement is what you have asked %EVAL to report. SAS will return 1 for true and 0 for false as it doesn't have an actuall Boolean data type. So 1000.1 is less than or equal to 1000.1 and the result is 1.

If you change to LT for strictly less than you would get a result of 0 since the comparison would be false.

Re: why result is 1 for %put %eval( 1000.1 LE 1000.1);?

Astounding — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:06:59 GMT

Also note ... because of the decimal point, %EVAL is forced to make a character comparison. (As was noted, %EVAL can perform arithmetic with integers only.) This expression would also return 1 because of the decimal point:

%eval( 9. > 80)

Since %sysevalf can perform non-integer arithmetic, this expression returns 0:

%sysevalf( 9. > 80)