Possibly they don't want to draw the entire fire from their library for every step? Maybe the file is slow coming off the server or something and they would rather have it in their local 'WORK' library instead?

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Nathaniel Wooding Sent: October 23, 2009 8:46 AM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: How can we stop the "do nothing data step"?

Opinion??

Yes. The guy/gal got in the habit of doing this way back when they first started learning SAS and did not realize that they could simply reference Perm.Need in the Proc.

At least it does not sound like they write

Data need; Set perm.need; Run; Data need1; Set need; Run; Proc Print; Run ; Etc.

Nat

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Data _null_; Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 8:13 AM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: How can we stop the "do nothing data step"?

I'm working on a project and one of the programmers has a macro that I can use to compute the magic number. "The documentation is in the header so just open it up etc.".

I open the program and read the header, looking at the parameters etc. and I scroll down to the macro definition and the very first thing I see is a "do nothing data step"

data need; set perm.need; run;

No subset(variables or obs), no sort, no new variables, no index creation, no nothing. The data set is used a bit further down in a PROC SQL and then it is sorted/nodupkey and the variables are subset, but "on the wrong side". That's another story so don't get me started.

In fact some of my fellow team members do this quite often, which is perplexing to me because my client claims to very particular about "SAS programming standards".

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