Hi:
Well, there was an example of an array in data_null_'s post. For a beginner, sometimes working with Arrays can be challenging. This paper is a good introduction to Array processing:
http://support.sas.com/rnd/papers/sgf07/arrays1780.pdf
There is an alternative, however, to using arrays.
You can keep the data in whatever form you want -- you can keep it long and wide for storage and reference and data entry purposes. But then you can create temporary datasets to do all the countring.
SAS has some perfectly wonderful procedures that do counts and percents --and-- if the data is in the right form, will give you ALL the information you want, either in report form or in dataset form.
Without knowing how you need to use the counts in other analysis, it's hard to make a recommendation about whether arrays are best or whether looking at PROC TRANSPOSE and PROC FREQ are best. Generally, I recommend starting with TRANSPOSE and FREQ or TRANSPOSE and TABULATE for beginners -- because it is easier, sometimes to deal with a self-contained procedure that only does 1 thing than to jump into DATA step processing, where the syntax and the process can sometimes be challenging.
cynthia