Date:         Tue, 25 Mar 2003 16:16:09 -0800
Reply-To:     "William W. Viergever" <wwvierg@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "William W. Viergever" <wwvierg@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject:      Re: Classic Mistake
Comments: To: Kevin Myers <KevinMyers@AUSTIN.RR.COM>
In-Reply-To:  <065201c2f32a$b03f9c50$6dc8a8c0@speedy>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

Double dots? .....


At 06:00 PM 03/25/2003 -0600, Kevin Myers wrote:

>Iam -
>
>Whew!  Boy Ian, that's a good one.  I hate to say it, but I'm stumped
>without further testing.  At first I thought that there might be a problem
>with resolution of &dirdata at macro compile time rather than execution
>time, but after some testing that doesn't seem to be the case.  In fact,
>this macro seems to work fine on my system, though I commented out the proc
>copy and just ran with options mprint for testing.  The only other thing
>that I can see which might be an issue is that there is no run statement,
>but I wouldn't think that should be a real problem either.  What am I
>missing???
>
>s/KAM
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Ian Whitlock" <WHITLOI1@WESTAT.COM>
>Newsgroups: bit.listserv.sas-l
>To: <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 3:52 PM
>Subject: Classic Mistake
>
>
> > A colleague came this afternoon with a problem.  She is converting version
>6
> > data to version 8 data in preparation for a move to from HP-Unix to Linux.
> > She had a program like the following.
> >
> > %macro convert ;
> >      libname v6 v6 "&dirdata\v6";
> >      libname v8 v8 "&dirdata";
> >
> >      proc copy in = v6 out = v8;
> > %mend ;
> >
> > %let dirdata=\home2\data1; %convert;
> > %let dirdata=\home2\data2; %convert;
> > /*
> > <more of the same>
> > */
> >
> > The problem was that the first version 6 library was not getting
>converted.
> > She was running in batch mode.  Why?  It is an important lesson to
> > understand about macro.  I am ashamed to say I spent more time thinking
> > questioning thoughts about SAS than should be needed before recognizing
>the
> > error (perhaps because I found the style of code so different from mine).
> > If you want to test you can run on any system, just make sure that there
>are
> > many lines of code commented out and use good directory names for your
> > system.
> >
> > IanWhitlock@westat.com
> >

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William W. Viergever          Voice  : (916) 483-8398
Viergever & Associates        Fax    : (916) 486-1488
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