topic Re: double brackets in SAS Programming

double brackets

christinawkhau — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 07:11:43 GMT

What does double brackets mean??

I see this in my sas program that I dont recognise:

sme=((Customer_type='C')):

how could the above be interpreted?

Re: double brackets

PeterClemmensen — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 07:46:54 GMT

You should interpret this as a boolean expression, meaning that it will return either 0 (FALSE) or 1 (TRUE). Programmers tend to use brackets to indicate a boolean expression, though usually, they are not necessary. In this case, the double brackets certainly are not necessary .

See the small example below.

data _null_;
   a = (1 = 2);
   b = (2 = 2);
   
   put (a b)(=);
run;

Re: double brackets

ballardw — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:54:00 GMT

@christinawkhau wrote:

What does double brackets mean??

I see this in my sas program that I dont recognise:

sme=((Customer_type='C')):

how could the above be interpreted?

Often when I see code with duplicated () I suspect either code editing, where some other element was present in the code such as below an removed OR thinking that such an addition was considered but not implemented.

sme=((Customer_type='C') and (othervar = something)):

The intent would be to force a dichotomous 1/0 valued result for the comparison.

If you haven't see that type of coding it is sometimes used in place of

If Customer_type='C' then sme= 1;
else sme=0 ;