topic History of SAS question in SAS Programming

History of SAS question

Tom — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 22:55:37 GMT

I have a history of SAS language question:

When did SAS introduce the SYSDATE9 automatic macro variable?

When did they add the YEARCUTOFF option?

Re: History of SAS question

Tom — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 23:04:45 GMT

I found the answer to the second part in this old TSNEWS entry. http://ftp.sas.com/service/techsup/tsnews-l/0040.html

Q: What is the default value of the YEARCUTOFF=option?

A: Beginning with its introduction in Release 6.06, the default
    value for the YEARCUTOFF= option is 1900. In Version 7 and
    Version 8 the default setting is 1920. Note that you will NOT
    want to use the Version 6 default of 1900 in your applications
    that process dates after January 1, 2000.

And from this truely helpful blog post : https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2013/08/02/how-old-is-your-version-of-sas-release-dates-for-sas-software.html We find the date of 01Mar1990.

Re: History of SAS question

Tom — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 23:24:01 GMT

@Tom wrote:

I found the answer to the second part in this old TSNEWS entry.  http://ftp.sas.com/service/techsup/tsnews-l/0040.html

Q: What is the default value of the YEARCUTOFF=option?

A: Beginning with its introduction in Release 6.06, the default
    value for the YEARCUTOFF= option is 1900. In Version 7 and
    Version 8 the default setting is 1920. Note that you will NOT
    want to use the Version 6 default of 1900 in your applications
    that process dates after January 1, 2000.

And from this truely helpful blog post :  https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2013/08/02/how-old-is-your-version-of-sas-release-dates-for-sas-software.html We find the date of 01Mar1990.

So I found this old V8 doc website. http://v8doc.sas.com/sashtml/ (you need to let your browser run the JAVA from the site to get it to work) and found the enhancements document for Version 8, which is really the same as the Version 7 enhancements with a special V8 tag next to items introduced in V8.

SYSDATE9

contains a SAS date value in DATE9. format, which displays a 2-digit date, the first three letters of the month name, and a 4-digit year.

Since Version 7 was released in 01Oct1998 we now have the answer to both questions.