Coding Standards for SAS Production Programs

Very Good article about Coding Standards penned down....

SAS Programming Efficiencies

The purpose of this document is to provide tips for improving the efficiency of your SAS programs. It suggests coding techniques, provides guidelines for their use, and compares examples of acceptable and improved ways to accomplish the same task. Most of the tips are limited to DATA step applications.

Efficiency

For the purpose of this discussion, efficiency will be defined simply as obtaining more results from fewer computer resources. When you submit a SAS program, the computer must:

• load the required software into memory 
• compile the program 
• find the data on which the program will execute 
• perform the operations requested in the program 
• report the result of the operations for your inspection

All of these tasks require time and space. Time and space for a computer program are composed of CPU time, I/O time, and memory.

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