A simple little macro I whipped up that’ll count down the number of days until an important event. %macro daysUntil(event, date); data _null_; diff = datdif(today(), input(“&date.”, anydtdte10.), ‘act/act’); call symput(‘days_until’, strip(diff)); run; %put There are &days_until days until &event; %mend; Macro call is straight forward: %daysUntil(Christmas, 12/25/2011); %daysUntil(Columbia_Marathon, 03/10/2012); I could have used various […]
Category: SAS
Too many pies can be hard to digest
On his SAS and R blog, Ken K. recently posted an example of a visualization technique called “small multiples”. In this exercise, Ken shows the programming technique for replicating a particular series of pie charts in R as well as in SAS. It’s a useful exercise to learn from, but […]
10 toughest interview questions for R developers (1)
I recently discovered 10 questions most daunting in R development, and I am trying to find the answers below.
1. Data structure — How many data structures R has? How do you build a binary search tree in R?
2. Sorting — How many sorting algorithms…
Those most productive R developers
The number of R packages on CRAN is 3,483 on 2011-12-12. The growth of R package in the past years can be fitted by a quadratic regression perfectly.
I am always interested in who are maintaining those packages. Then I wrote an R script to extract …
SAS Enterprise Guide: Updating the Metadata with New/Modified Datasets
When working in SAS Enterprise Guide, you can access data from the metadata libraries. When you make changes to the datasets in the meta library, such as adding or modifying columns, or even deleted datasets, the metadata library does not have the data…
Building custom measures for OLAP cubes
In one minute (and 10 seconds, but are you measuring that?) you can add a custom measure (also known as calculated members) to your OLAP cube. Watch this video to create a simple calculation multiplying units * price. Remember that this mechanism is no…
NOTE: Hash Tables, An Introduction
In my recent series of articles on testing I used the hash table to provide a means to write/update a table from within a DATA step without demanding changes to the DATA statement, etc. I’ve had some very kind feedback on the series, plus some reques…
Mmm… Dr. G and the M&Ms
“Do you really serve M&Ms every Wednesday? Tell us the story!” clamored a wide-eyed class after sampling the M&Ms lighting up the breakout area. Seeing how hard they worked on their exercises, it seemed ok to have a slight diversion from …