Two things that make me nuts when I work with SAS:
no here documents
no string interpolation
Ok, now that I got that out of the way. I am thinking of putting together a talk on version control for SAS programmers. Do you currently use version control for your SAS programs? Yes, no, which one, why?
I use git for nearly everything. Not sure how I ever got by without it.
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Version Control
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I have my own manual version control that I implement, via several custom macros I've created.
ReplyDeleteAt SAS, we use a variety of source control technologies for different projects, including CVS (and recently, Git). Personally, I end up in CVS for most projects. I rely on TortoiseCVS for file system integration with Windows, which gives me easy access to histories, differencing tools, annotated changes, and more.
ReplyDeleteI do use SAS Enterprise Guide for virtually all of my SAS programming, and while that doesn't offer integration with a version control system, the file-system integration is workable.
How would string interpolation be different than using SAS macro variables? Seems like you could get it to work in a very similar fashion.
ReplyDeleteYes, macro variables allow pretty straightforward string interpolation. But macro is compile time, and usually by the time I am writing things out to a file I am in execution time.
ReplyDeleteWe use SVN through TortoiseSVN on Windows, integrates quick and seamless.
ReplyDeleteI have used IBM Rational ClearCase since 2003 and designed/developed a Unix / Windows SAS GxP environment at Novartis. It still runs today and suports ca 3500 make runs a day and 800 online users.
ReplyDeleteThere is a paper about the architecture of the system and possibilites of ClearCase here: http://www.lexjansen.com/phuse/2005/as/as09.pdf
I could not work on a system without it anymore. Using make is another vital step towards peace of mind.
If I was doing it today I would probably use a distributed system like Mercurial or Git. This scales well for small teams and is easier to sync geographically separated teams (than ClearCase).
DaveG
I agree about string interpolation - when I started Korn shell I looked for the character functions like substr() and couldn't find any. I nearly freaked out. But string interpolations work better do all you need and dont require a dictionary of 200 character functions. :-)
ReplyDeleteSAS does have here documents : datalines in an embedded data step!
I would add associative arrays like awk has had since 1977 - but they have now arrived as the hash object. I would like record structured macro variables, macro vectors and matrices and hash objects that persist in memory between data steps.
A way to make the PDV a matrix would be nice (eg hold a whole by group at a time).
DaveG