thank you for your reply! even after removing the semicolon you highlighted, I am still getting some errors. Hopefully this will be more helpful?   1 OPTIONS NONOTES NOSTIMER NOSOURCE NOSYNTAXCHECK; 68 69 data question2; 70 infile "/home/u59352003/btt.dat.txt"; 71 input childid 1-4 sex 6 bweight 8-11 gestage 13-14 momage 16-17 parity 19 mdbp 21-23 msbp 25-27 momeduc 29 mmedaid 31 71 ! socio 33 dbp5 35-37 sbp5 39-41 ht5 43 -47 wt5 49-52 hdl5 54 -57 trig5 64-67 smoke5 69 medaid5 71 socio5 73; 72 bmi = bweight/(ht5^2); _ 22 76 ERROR 22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following: <, <=, =, >, >=, EQ, GE, GT, LE, LT, NE, NG, NL, ^=, ~=. ERROR 76-322: Syntax error, statement will be ignored. 73 run; NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors. WARNING: The data set WORK.QUESTION2 may be incomplete. When this step was stopped there were 0 observations and 21 variables. WARNING: Data set WORK.QUESTION2 was not replaced because this step was stopped. NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time): real time 0.00 seconds user cpu time 0.00 seconds system cpu time 0.00 seconds memory 646.12k OS Memory 24228.00k Timestamp 09/15/2021 04:29:08 AM Step Count 52 Switch Count 0 Page Faults 0 Page Reclaims 70 Page Swaps 0 Voluntary Context Switches 0 Involuntary Context Switches 0 Block Input Operations 0 Block Output Operations 8 74 proc print data = question2 (obs=10); 75 var childid ht5 bweight bmi; ERROR: Variable HT5 not found. 76 run; NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors. NOTE: PROCEDURE PRINT used (Total process time): real time 0.00 seconds user cpu time 0.00 seconds system cpu time 0.00 seconds memory 485.71k OS Memory 24228.00k Timestamp 09/15/2021 04:29:08 AM Step Count 53 Switch Count 0 Page Faults 0 Page Reclaims 50 Page Swaps 0 Voluntary Context Switches 0 Involuntary Context Switches 0 Block Input Operations 0 Block Output Operations 0 77 78 OPTIONS NONOTES NOSTIMER NOSOURCE NOSYNTAXCHECK; 88 ... View more