The reverse-vname function - how do I get the value of a variable via its name?

[ChrisNZ]

Yes this works too.

Personally, I avoid querying the dictionary as it can be very sssllloooww when many tables are online, especially RDBMS tables.

As you say, poor cat... 

[LaurieF]

I agree that dictionary.tables (or sashelp.vtable) can be problematic, especially if the library contains views of external databases which it has to look through, because of  columns like nobs. I've never, or rarely, had problems with dictionary.columns however. And f you're explicit about the libname and memname, the internal indexing is very efficient.

Again in this case I knew the libname contained no views and it returned the response effectively instantly.

[ChrisNZ]

Good to know. I'll try to access the variable-level dictionary again then.