At 18:01 03/03/99 +0000, Peter Crawford wrote:

>Should we make it a standard that the first statement in a macro is >%local

and John Whittington responded:

>... or, had some clever person thought of it in the first place (too late to >change now, I guess, becasue of compatability problems), to make that the >default, with Global having to be 'user-requested' by a statement!

As many are aware, the rule for the creation of macro variables is: the macro processor searches the current referencing environment and all other referencing environments of that name. It changes the value of that variable rather than create a new one.

I find this rule to be completely counterintuitive and a very bad feature of the language.

So, yes.. I strongly believe that one should get in the habit of declaring local macro variables explicitly with a %local statement. Many people use &i, &j, &cnt, &count, &num etc., and without the %local declaration, the chances of clashing with macro variables in other environments are very high. Going a step further, I believe this convention should part of a shop's programming standards.

Paul Gill Author of "The Next Step: Integrating the Software Lifecycle with SAS Programming" Director of Bioclinical Data Services Inc. (925) 831-9169 paulgill@jps.net