You could. There are plently of posts on parameter lists. In most of them you will find me advising against it. The code gets large and unreadble very quickly having to maks/unmask, reference other references etc.
IMO if you are writing macros/system for other people you will first want to read up on Software Development Life Cycle. Sit down and plan what it is you want to achieve, how things fit together, what the standards will be, how things will be tested. Once you have all the documentation - Functional Design Specifications, Testing Document etc. then start looking at coding. In the companies I have worked for the first thing I notice when I get there is at least one folder full up with undocumented, untested, vague bits of code put into macros over 10 years or more.
In response to your point, there are various methods, yes parambuff is one of them. However me personally, I would put paramters into a dataset. The reason is that datasets are very easy to work with, do checking on etc. Its also easy to pass parameter tables through:
%macro Do_Something (Parameter_Table=work.abc);
%Check_Parameter_Table (Parameter_Table=&Parameter_Table.);
...
You can set up your dataset any way you like with as much information as you need, and example:
PARAMETER VALUE CHECK
FILE c:\temp\temp.xlsx EXISTENCE
OUT_LOCATION c:\temp EXISTENCE
...
Then your check is simply:
data _null_;
set parameter_table;
call execute('%'||strip(check)||'("'||strip(value)||'");');
run;
And this will generate the following two macro calls:
%EXISTENCE("c:\temp\temp.xlsx");
%EXISTENCE("c:\temp");
That said, that is just an example and heavily depends on what you want to do and where. For simple macros, its quite simple to have your checks up front and then then jump to the end if fails:
%macro Test (file=);
%if %sysfunc(fileexist(&file.))=0 %then %do;
%put Macro Test failed to find &file. and has stopped operation;
%goto exit;
%end;
/* Process file */
...
%put Macro Test passed execution;
%exit:
%mend Test;
