What is the high level structure of a SAS program?

A SAS program consists multiple statement blocks of 2 block types: DATA and PROC:

• DATA - To create a data set that will be used by subsequent statement blocks.
• PROC - To perform analysis on given data sets.

Here is an example of a SAS program that have 2 statement blocks:

DATA Club;
  INPUT Id 1-4 Name $ 6-22 Weight 24-25;
  DATALINES;
1023 David Shaw        77
1049 Amelia Serrano    72
1219 Alan Nance        83
1246 Ravi Sinha        66
1078 Ashley McKnight   62
;

PROC MEANS DATA=Club;
  VAR Weight;

If you enter the above SAS program in SAS Studio and click "Run". You will see 3 types of results from the run:

1. Log - It records details on how the SAS program was executed as shown below:

1          OPTIONS NONOTES NOSTIMER NOSOURCE NOSYNTAXCHECK;
72
73         DATA Club;
74         INPUT Id 1-4 Name $ 6-22 Weight 24-25;
75         DATALINES;

NOTE: The data set WORK.CLUB has 5 observations and 3 variables.
NOTE: DATA statement used:
  real time           0.08 seconds
  cpu time            0.02 seconds

81         ;
82
83         PROC MEANS DATA=Club;
84         VAR Weight;
85
86
87         OPTIONS NONOTES NOSTIMER NOSOURCE NOSYNTAXCHECK;

2. Results - It records results generate from SAS program statements as shown below:

                 MEANS PROCEDURE

                 Variable: Weight
N  Mean        Std. Deviation   Minimum     Maximum
5  72.0000000  8.3964278        62.0000000  83.0000000

3. Output - It displays data sets created from the SAS program as shown below:

Total Lines: 5  Total Columns: 3  Lines 1-5

      Id  Name             Weight
---------------------------------
 1  1023  David Shaw           77
 2  1049  Amelia Serrano       72
 3  1219  Alan Nance           83
 4  1246  Ravi Sinha           66
 5  1078  Ashley McKnight      62

⇒ SAS DATA Statement

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⇑ SAS Language Basics

⇑⇑ SAS - Frequently Asked Questions