topic Re: how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable? in SAS Programming

how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable?

balu_g — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 02:21:48 GMT

Hi, I have a question? numeric and character data has default length is 8 bytes. In the character data "one byte for one character." Then how many digits can store in one byte?

Re: how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable?

mkeintz — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 02:42:23 GMT

Search for "SAS numeric precision".

Re: how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable?

WarrenKuhfeld — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 06:45:06 GMT

You can store 256 numbers, 0 to 255. They have 1 to 3 digits.

Re: how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable?

SASKiwi — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 07:21:54 GMT

I assume this is a theoretical question as you can't define a 1 byte numeric variable in SAS. For Windows / Unix the minimum is 3 bytes.

Re: how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable?

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:12:57 GMT

It depends on how you store your numbers.

If stored as character in human-readable form, you obviously have one digit per byte.

If stored as character, but with the IBM packed decimal format, you have 2 digits per byte.

If you do some trickery and work with pure integers in character strings, each byte can hold 256 numbers, so the number of digits is that of the number 256 ** (number of bytes) - 1.

As mentioned, numeric has a minimum length of 3, and for that, search for "SAS numeric precision" to know how the storage lengths influence the maximum precision and the largest integer that can be stored exactly.

Re: how many digits can store in the one byte of memory of numeric variable?

ballardw — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 15:37:21 GMT

@balu_g wrote:

Hi, I have a question? numeric and character data has default length is 8 bytes. In the character data "one byte for one character." Then how many digits can store in one byte?

For actual use in SAS datasets, that is a question of little concern as the smallest numeric variable in bytes is 2 or 3 (and mostly 3 IIRC)

length

specifies a numeric constant that is the number of bytes used for storing variable values.

Range For numeric variables, 2 to 8 or 3 to 8, depending on your operating environment. For character variables, 1 to 32767 under all operating environments.