SAS Program Editor

[Tushar]

Hi All,

i am here again with a query for SAS, my query is if someone is having BASE SAS 9.2  or SAS EG 4.2 then what is the need of extra program editor like UltraEdit?

i mean same things we can done through SAS EG 4.2 or Base SAS 9.2, you know creating,modifying and saving SAS Program. Please tell me.

Thanks in Advance,

Tushar J.

[Reeza]

User preference.

You don't need it but some people are either used to it, prefer that it opens as text and doesn't open in SAS/EG so no change of accidentally running something and it has a few other features, eg search/replace/find/compare that are better.

Whether or not those are useful are a personal preference.

[Doc_Duke]

I'll echo Reeza.  For the casual user, it may not make much difference (especially when you include the learning curve).  For the power user, there can be huge productivity gains.

I use EMACS as my editor because the same operations work on both Unix and the PC.  Once you get past the learning curve, it is a heck of a lot faster to use.

I do like the new syntax sensitive SAS editor in EG 5.1.  If knows 90+ percent of the SAS syntax and saves looking up the things that I don't use everyday.

[bentleyj1]

My work life would be lot more of a hassle without UltraEdit.

I have SAS jobs that run on Unix servers.  For development and testing I use the SAS Editor and the RSUBMIT-ENDRSUBMT commands to direct execution to the appropriate server.

Once the code is in production, I use UltraEdit for maintenance and modifications.  (We use a home-grown shell script-based code management application for check in/check out.)  The power of UltraEdit as I use it is that its FTP Accounts entry in the Explorer window allows you connect to UNIX servers and then open edit, and save programs there.  It works in both FTP and SFTP environments if properly set up, which isn't difficult.  I also do shell scripting and PL/SQL coding and UltraEdit lets me work with that code the same way.

Textpad has the same UNIX file access/editing capability but I've had trouble with it's file saving functionality under SFTP.

Actually, maybe that's something the SAS folks could investigate.  Have their Editor's Explorer window map to UNIX directories with the ability to edit files stored there.  Sounds like something for the SAS Ballot.

[Tushar]

Thanks a lot to all and specially Bentleyj1 for giving clearer idea....