Ian,

Reasonable questions and requests so I will try to respond appropriately. I'm leaving for a much needed vacation tomorrow, however, so this exercise will have to wait until next week. I will say just this much now. I don't normally allow others to set the terms for debates or discussions which you seem to be intent on doing. When I post my response to your questions and requests and the functionally equivalent SAS Component Language program, I will be mostly interested in the opinions and sentiments of the world SAS community as represented by SAS-L. I have a clear goal in mind. I want as many SAS professionals as possible to be armed and dangerous with SAS Component Language know how when they compete with all the alternatives to SAS in the market place. I just don't believe the SAS Macro Language is up to the challenge.

Joe

Joe,

Is it too much to ask that this time you produce the functionality of the final macro rather than that of a particular test example? This means that you will not need to rewrite or even recompile any of the code you claim to be functionally equivalent to the macro, when I provide a data set ONE with variables and values, that your SCL code will provide a correct data set TEMP for the named variables and descriptions.

Let's see the final macro is 10 lines long (38 words, 304 characters) and it took about 15 minutes to write and test. Your quoted text has 3 times as may words as the macro. If your code is so simple why didn't you include it in you message? Since code speaks so much more forcefully than a message of claims, you must have had a reason for not including the code. What is it?

In your message you hinted that your code would be shorter and cleaner. I remind you that while "cleaner" is a subjective term, "shorter" is a measurable objective term. Do you wish to retract the hint that your code will be shorter?

Ian Whitlock