Date:         Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:05:10 -0700
Reply-To:     "Anderson, James" <James.Anderson@UCSF.EDU>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Anderson, James" <James.Anderson@UCSF.EDU>
Subject:      Re: %FOR Macro Release 2.0 - It's Simplified and Objectified
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Some of you folks seem to dislike macros.  Do you also dislike functions?  Do you compute square-root with a newton-raphson iteration in a data step?

Technology is scaled up by encapsulating complexity.

Object-oriented programming has shown the practicality of looping over different kinds of things with the same statements.  The code is smaller, more consistent, and lets you concentrate on the problem being solved, rather than the mechanics of looping.  On my sascommunity.org piece, I  solved 3 problems from SAS-L in less code than anyone has done so far and gave a similar look to solutions to very different problems.  Take a look at the %for macro from that perspective - you might find it useful .

Regards,

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Abernathy [mailto:tom.abernathy@GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2009 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: %FOR Macro Release 2.0 - It's Simplified and Objectified

This %FOR macro reminds me of my first programming job back in 1979.
We were using assembly code for the Z-80 microprocessor. We wrote our
programs using a macro assembler.  Another new college grad was
working on part of the system.  He liked to use PL/1 so he wrote a
series of macros that made it so he could write his code as if it was
PL/1.  The resulting code didn't fit in the memory on the system, run
too slow and no one could understand it.

Needless to say one of the senior programmers had to totally rewrite
that section of the project.

- Tom Abernathy

On Oct 11, 1:10 pm, j...@STANFORDALUMNI.ORG (Jack Hamilton) wrote:
> Calling it object-oriented doesn't mean that it is.
> On Oct 10, 2009, at 12:04 pm, xlr82sas wrote:
> > On Oct 10, 3:42 am, "nina" <s...@mailinator.com> wrote:
> >> shorter link to samehttp://20.fi/2843
>