E-mail has its own support in SAS. I'd like to see SAS support another Internet standard (see RFC 5545 - RFC 5545 - Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) ), the iCalendar file. These files have a file extension of '.ics' in most operating systems.
iCalendar files provide a standard, structured format for calendar information and can contain multiple events per file with lots of different attributes (see the RFC). Here's an example with one event. Multiple calendar events, each bracketed by BEGIN:VEVENT / END:VEVENT, can be included in one calendar file which begins with BEGIN:VCALENDAR and ends with END:VCALENDAR. Read the RFC for details (and notice that the X- components are "experimental" and vendor-specific, not necessarily needed in any SAS support.
iCalendar support would allow one to create events in SAS and have the program create the format correctly, providing some things automatically (for example PRODID: would be SAS-specific but static for each version.
One of the best use cases for this: if you create these files on a web server, most calendar programs (like Outlook, iCal, and Phone calendars) can "subscribe" to them so as they are updated the updates get reflected in those calendar visualization tools. This can be a good way to "visualize" event-based data. If you do something Outlook-compatible (or if the standard supports it), you can use HTML in the X-ALT-DESC. I wrote a SAS program that creates these files via PUT, that includes links to performance data charts. One calendar entry for each day links to multiple charts for that day.
The main trick to handling this file type is appending new events - you have to write everything but the END:VCALENDAR, then write the new VEVENT info, then add the END:VCALENDAR
There are a few sites and mailing lists related to iCalendar, but I would start with Calconnect.org, an organization intent on standardizing calendar info and exchange until it "just works" like e-mail .
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 12.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-MS-OLK-FORCEINSPECTOROPEN:TRUE
BEGIN:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20120315T195410Z
DESCRIPTION:Vic Theater <http://www.victheatre.com/> \n
DTEND:20120328T030000Z
DTSTAMP:20120315T195410Z
DTSTART:20120328T000000Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20120315T195410Z
LOCATION:Vic Theater\, Chicago\, IL
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:Kelly Hogan with The Magnetic Fields
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
UID:040000008200E00074C5B7101A82E008000000008027CA5FC102CD01000000000000000
010000000AFA2FE2B6F35364BAB3240153BD89767
X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//E
N">\n<HTML>\n<HEAD>\n<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server ve
rsion 08.00.0681.000">\n<TITLE></TITLE>\n</HEAD>\n<BODY>\n<!-- Converted f
rom text/rtf format -->\n\n<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN><A HREF="h
ttp://www.victheatre.com/"><SPAN LANG="en-us"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FAC
E="Calibri">Vic Theater</FONT></U></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></A><SP
AN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></P>\n\n</BODY>\n</HTML>
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:FREE
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
X-MICROSOFT-DISALLOW-COUNTER:FALSE
X-MS-OLK-ALLOWEXTERNCHECK:TRUE
X-MS-OLK-AUTOFILLLOCATION:FALSE
X-MS-OLK-AUTOSTARTCHECK:FALSE
X-MS-OLK-CONFTYPE:0
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
