C style structures

[KrisNori]

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 ?

[Reeza]

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

[KrisNori]

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

[Reeza]

Can you please explain in more detail?

[Kurt_Bremser]

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.

ie

%let struct_a = var_1 var_2 var3;

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

[Ksharp]

Maybe you could take a look at Hash Table .

[LinusH]

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?

[ballardw]

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;