Handbook of SAS DATA Step Programming

6 Handbook of SAS

®

DATA Step Programming

compare the value from the MISSING function with 1 by adding the NOT

operator. For example,

if not (missing(age) eq 1) then

if age > 26 then age_hi = 1; else age_hi = 0;

In SAS, any numerical value other than 0 or the missing value is consid-

ered TRUE, and the missing value and 0 are considered FALSE. Since the

MISSING function returns a numerical value with either 1 (for TRUE) or 0

(for FALSE), it is redundant to compare values from the MISSING function

with 1 explicitly. You can simply write the following:

if not missing(age) then

if age > 26 then age_hi = 1; else age_hi = 0;

In some applications, you also need to compare a numeric variable explicitly

with 1. For example, in the HEARING data set, t