hi victor

i reported a similar problem to sas a while back. whilst our local office accepted and agred a problem existed, cary could not reproduce and basically left us with no useful response. you have narrowed it down much further than we could so you may get a better response. this was onsolaris 2.5 running 6.12.

We did however as of 6.12 replace all our macro function calls with use of %sysfunc. this allows you to use data step functions in macro and seems much quicker. it is also gives a bit easier to read code with less knowledge of macro required.

eg

%let upper = %sysfunc(upcase(&string)) %let sub = %sysfunc(&string,5,3))

Don

Victor Bos wrote: > > Hello everybody, > > During the development of a quite complex macro I noticed that the running > time of that macro increased each time I submitted it. When I tried to find > out how this is caused, I noticed that the resolving of macrovariables > takes more and more time at each invocation. The following simple program > shows the problem: > > %macro q; > data _null_; > call symput ('t', time ()); > run; > > %do i = 1 %to 100; > %let j = %lowcase (&i); > %end; > > data _null_; > t = time () - &t; > put t=; > run; > %mend; > > %q; > > If you run the %q macro, say 50 times, you'll see time t increase. I tried > it on an RS/6000 machine running AIX (SAS 6.12), a DEC Alpha running VMS > (SAS 6.09), and Windows95 (SAS 6.12). The problem seems to exist at all > those operating systems, although the problem seems to be less big on > Windows95, as the time seems not only to increase, but also decrease in > subsequent invocations. > > My question is: has anyone of you encountered this problem? Perhaps on > other operating systems? > > Victor Bos, > Origin /Business Management Solutions. > > PS: Another thing I noticed is that if you replace the %lowcase in the > program above by %upcase, the program runs much, much faster. This is > explainable as %upcase is a macro function, and %lowcase is an autocall > macro provided by SAS. So a good programming habit is to use %upcase > instead of %lowcase in macros if possible.

-- =========================================================================== Don Stanley Don_Stanley@IBM.NET Ph 0064 021 479 863 Fax 0064 04 386 2038 (Computer fax not always operating)

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