Writing Maintainable Code with ‘Style’ Allan Page Senior Marketing Analyst Canadian Tire Bank

Valid SAS Code can be hard to read!

Starting each statement on a new line helps

Blank lines are good for step separation.

Indentation helps define processes within a step.

Indentation is good with do/end groups too.

Use tab stops to line up repeated code.

Add comments to say what’s happening.

Comments have different styles.

A misplaced comment! 1 data one; NOTE: SCL source line. 2 set sasuser.whse *comment;; ERROR: File WORK.COMMENT.DATA does not exist. ERROR : Syntax error, expecting one of the following: a name, a quoted string, (, ;, END, KEY, KEYS, NOBS, OPEN, POINT, _DATA_, _LAST_, _NULL_. ERROR : The option or parameter is not recognized and will be ignored. 3 run; NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors. WARNING: The data set WORK.ONE may be incomplete. When this step was stopped there were 0 observations and 3 variables. NOTE: DATA statement used: real time 0.18 seconds cpu time 0.09 seconds

Number Code Sections /*=====================================================================+ | trs07.sas 20 | | Set the initial file. | +======================================================================*/ data _null_; set exp; call symput ("mtoday",today()); call symput ("topics",0); -- more code -- /*=====================================================================+ | trs07.sas 30 | | Global statements for macros. | +======================================================================*/ %global asterisk tq crse instn bbase form1 partone parttwo parthre partfiv partsix partsvn partegt partnin partten parteln parttwv partthr part813 wtblnk quizname webcrse webct dsn;

Use numbers in program names.  Program names END START would not sort in their required run sequence.  Program names 001STARTand 002END would be properly ordered.

Use date functions instead of hard-coding dates in your programs. data _null_; call symput('lstmth',put(intnx('month',date(),-1,'end'),date9.)); run; %put lstmth= &lstmth; lstmth= 30SEP2004

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