Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 13:56:53 -0500
Reply-To: "Fehd, Ronald J. (PHPPO)" <rjf2@CDC.GOV>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: "Fehd, Ronald J. (PHPPO)" <rjf2@CDC.GOV>
Subject: Re: %squeeze macro
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
My sentiments exactly.
Too often SAS documentation as well as SAS employee papers
provide us examples of programming reeeeally badly!
Well, for ideas and cut&paste of various lines of code
the examples work and
that may be acceptable, but, on the whole, ...
I'll quote my favorite LaTeX warning:
"Badness happening" |-(
Ron Fehd the macro maven CDC Atlanta GA USA RJF2@cdc.gov
Efficiency is intelligent laziness. -David Dunham
... but let's not get carried away by such swiftness.
> From: Chang Y. Chung [mailto:chang_y_chung@HOTMAIL.COM]
> It may be just me, but sometimes I feel that some part of SI
> is completely out of sink with other parts that does a great
> job. For example, SAS Certification web page has such a bad
> example of the Certification Exam questions as we discussed
> it a little bit before in sas-l. Today, I received a monthly
> newsletter called EDUmation. One of its features is about
> this new macro called %squeeze -- I checked it out and I
> think it could be much improved. In fact, as it is (even
> though it seems to be the second version), it is just a bad
> example of how to program a macro.
>
> For example:(1)it has two required parameters called DSNIN
> and DSNOUT. I am not sure the reason why they are not called
> DATA= and OUT=, as in most of the procedures; (2)In the
> middle of the source, it creates N_CHAR and N_NUM variables.
> It could be %local'ed to be safer; (3)It uses "set nobs="
> method to check if the input dataset has any observations at
> all; (4)In the middle of the macro source, you realize that
> this macro creates potentially a lot of global variables,
> which are not documented at all at the header, even though it
> has four different NOTE's. This is just a beginning. In
> summary, this is not a good example of macro programming. Why
> feature it at the newsletter? Or is it just me? :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Chang
>
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