topic Re: C style structures in SAS Programming

C style structures

KrisNori — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 21:39:27 GMT

Hi there,

I need to create a C language style structure that can hold heterogenous variables in it. What's the way to do it in SAS ?

Re: C style structures

Reeza — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 21:40:08 GMT

Variables in SAS are numeric or character. What are you trying to do with said structure?

Re: C style structures

KrisNori — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 21:52:32 GMT

Hi Reeza, I want to use the struct to compare records in a different table.

Re: C style structures

Reeza — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 22:12:09 GMT

Can you please explain in more detail?

Re: C style structures

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 08:29:20 GMT

There are no structure objects in SAS tables or in the SAS data step language. SAS programming is less procedural like C, but more database-like.

If you need to group variables, you might take a look at macro variables.

%let struct_a = var_1 var_2 var3;

proc sort data=whatever;
by &struct_a;
run;

Re: C style structures

Ksharp — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 09:22:06 GMT

Maybe you could take a look at Hash Table .

Re: C style structures

LinusH — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 16:47:35 GMT

In the SCL programming language you could build list object structures that can be compared. That's available within the AF module.

But may I ask what you are trying to achieve? What kind if data do you have, and why do you wish to use SAS for this particular case?

Re: C style structures

ballardw — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:02:36 GMT

I agree with @LinusH . It may be better if you could post a little bit of example start data, the desired output and business rules involved.

You may be more familiar with C but many of the approaches C users might propose are 1) almost "unnatural" for SAS and 2) may well not take advantage of SAS features.

My favorite example for comparing with other languages similar to C: You have a data set with a largish number of records and about 1000 numerical variables that you want to calculate mean, min, max, number of non-missing values. How many lines of code would you estimate to accomplish that in C?

SAS: Proc means dataset=setname; run;