SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9, Third Edition

Additional Features

Comments in SAS Programs

You can insert comments into a SAS program to document the purpose of the program, to explain segments of the program, or to describe the steps in a complex program or calculation. A comment statement begins and ends with a comment symbol. There are two forms of comment statements:

*text;

or

 /*text*/

SAS ignores text between comment symbols during processing.

The following program shows some of the ways comments can be used to describe a SAS program.

 /* Read national sales data for vans */ /* from an external raw data file */ data perm.vansales; infile vandata; input @1 Region $9. @13 Quarter 1. /* Values are 1, 2, 3, or 4 */ @16 TotalSales comma11.; /* Print the entire data set */ proc ...