Zio: SAS-L is the listserver that you are using to post questions.

Jim has suggested several ways of creating the equivalent of a scalar value in a SAS program. I'll trace through the extreme case of a SAS SQL program:

/* Create observations in a SAS dataset (which SAS SQL reads as a table). */ data work.test; input x; cards; 5 3 7 2 9 ; run; /* Create a one-column, one-row table equivalent to a scalar variable. */ proc sql; create table work.y (y num(3)); insert into work.y set y=6; quit; /* Multiply each row in the table work.test by the value assigned to a degenerate table of relvar type 'cell' (scalar variable). */ proc sql; create table z as select test.x * y.y as z from work.test inner join work.y on 1 /* 1 in SAS SQL means 'true'*/ ; /* when used as an argument.*/ quit;

Once a programmer builds a loop construct to read a file, an equivalent program written in a procedural language requires much the same overhead. As applications become more complex, procedural language constructs become much more complex than equivalent set-logic constructs of SQL.

Different programming problems have inspired very different programming languages: C, Lisp, APL, SQL, Forth (an OOP precursor), and Prolog, for example. The SAS Data step and SQL operate on rows/obs in tables/datasets as opposed to sequences of bytes, sequences of tokens, functions of variable arguments, data objects, or propositions. Once you see a wider range of operations on data structures, symbolic pointers to memory locations (scalar variable names) will not seem as fundamental or critical to programming. Sig -----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Zio Fester Sent: Monday, July 19, 2004 10:05 AM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: creating a scalar variable

In article <446DDE75CFC7E1438061462F85557B0F027E6C68 @remail2.westat.com>, HERMANS1@WESTAT.COM says... > Zio: > I hope that your instructor doesn't subscribe to SAS-L!

Please forgive my ignorance, but what does that happen to be?

> Whatever his or her > skill level, it does turn out that SAS, like many other so-called > 'database programming languages', operates on actual or virtual > tables. A table can degenerate to a one-column, one-row cell that has > many of the properties of a scalar. More typically, a database > programmer combines tabular datasets to produce solutions to > programming problems.

Does this mean that SAS can only "think" row by row and that there's no way to create a scalar variable (or a 1x1 matrix...) accessible from any part of my code?

> It takes a while to learn how to combine tabular datasets effectively. > Once you learn how, you will be able to do more in less time and with > fewer errors. Sig