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It's very helpful to name your graphic images in a consistent way when creating items in SAS/GRAPH with a name statement.  Currently we are limited to 8 characters.  It would be great to go to 32 characters as for variable and data set names.  I'm old enough to remember when we were limited to 5 characters for variable names on some antiquated systems (i.e. UNIVAC) so I'm pretty good at trimming down names but I'd rather not have to!

2 Comments
ballardw
Super User

Since the graphic catalogs are pretty much tied to the device based graphics and SAS is moving to the "statistical graph" or more html based graphs I don't see this happening as it would require a major change to catalogs in general.

 

And I remember IBM BASIC where variable names were restricted to one letter and one digit for a maximum of 2 character names.

paulkaefer
Lapis Lazuli | Level 10

Related is this suggestion. I understand that what @ballardw is saying is true, it would require a major change. But I really like this suggestion, and think it's a good idea. I have seen legacy code in my day that was still named <= 8 characters due to file name limits. With space (generally) not being an issue anymore, this should definitely be feasible.