Date:         Fri, 10 Dec 1999 20:09:31 -0800
Reply-To:     Walter Smith <wjsmith1NOwjSPAM@FEDEX.COM.INVALID>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Walter Smith <wjsmith1NOwjSPAM@FEDEX.COM.INVALID>
Organization: http://www.remarq.com: The World's Usenet/Discussions Start Here
Subject:      Re: Free alternatives to Base/SAS

OK, I'll put the porqupine quills away. Seems that we agree more than
disagree, but I missed that in your first post. However, I'm puzzled
about:

> But think about it. How many times have you had to deal with starting
> values, etc., in SAS, when you knew that if you could resolve the > >
problem to a basic summand + functional; statement you could skip
> all that?

Are you talking about something like this?:

<pre>
1          data blue;
2             do until(x=10);
3                x+1;
4                sumx+x;
5                sumx2+x*x;
6                put x= sumx=  sumx2=;
7             end;
8          run;

X=1 SUMX=1 SUMX2=1
X=2 SUMX=3 SUMX2=5
X=3 SUMX=6 SUMX2=14
X=4 SUMX=10 SUMX2=30
X=5 SUMX=15 SUMX2=55
X=6 SUMX=21 SUMX2=91
X=7 SUMX=28 SUMX2=140
X=8 SUMX=36 SUMX2=204
X=9 SUMX=45 SUMX2=285
X=10 SUMX=55 SUMX2=385
NOTE: The data set WORK.BLUE has 1 observations and 3 variables.
NOTE: DATA statement used:
      real time           0.040 seconds
      cpu time            0.028 seconds
</pre>

Yes, the sytax is x+1, not like Perl's x++ but...

> but I use those hacks in quick ways that make Perl useful when SAS
> is more work. How many lines of SAS code would you need to write a
> program to read through a file and count the number of commas which
> were not preceded by a backslash or immediately followed by another
> comma?

I agree that for many things, Perl or even awk or shell commands excel.
An example: the very simple unix command "id". stdout is easily
manipulated by many unix tools, but to read a pipe in SAS, I recently
wrote:

<pre>
/***********************************************************
*   Name:  getusrid                                        *
*   Desc:  Get the users Unix userid.                      *
*   Type:  Macro Function - Unix                           *
*                                                          *
*   Usage:  %let macro-var-name = %getusrid;               *
*                                                          *
*   Walt Smith                 November 30, 1999           *
***********************************************************/
%macro getusrid;
   %local fref rc fid userid;
   %let rc =%sysfunc(filename(fref,id,pipe));   %*define fileref as
pipe;
   %let fid=%sysfunc(fopen   (&fref,s));        %*open fileref (pipe);
   %let rc =%sysfunc(fread   (&fid));           %*read into buffer;
   %let rc =%sysfunc(fget    (&fid,inrec));     %*copy into variable;
   %let rc =%sysfunc(fclose  (&fid));           %*close fileref;
   %let rc =%sysfunc(filename(fref));           %*clear fileref;
   %let userid=%scan(&inrec,2);
   &userid
%mend;
</pre>



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