Tag: debugging

Code debugging and program history in SAS Enterprise Guide

SAS programmers have high expectations for their coding environment, and why shouldn’t they? Companies have a huge investment in their SAS code base, and it’s important to have tools that help you understand that code and track changes over time. Few things are more satisfying as a SAS program that […]

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Tracking progress in your program with SAS Enterprise Guide: another trick

I’ve got a new trick that you can use to track progress in a long-running SAS program, while using SAS Enterprise Guide. I’ve previously written about the SYSECHO statement and how you can use it to update the Task Status window with custom messages. SYSECHO is a “global” statement in […]

NOTE: I’ll be Busy at SAS Global Forum! #sasgf13

I was very pleased to be invited to present a paper at this year’s SAS Global Forum in San Francisco in April/May. To then have my contributed paper accepted too was icing on the cake. I don’t yet know the dates and times where my two papers will be …

End-To-End Debugging with Six Sigma DMAIC

I’ve mentioned my use of Six Sigma techniques for debugging a couple of times before (5 Whys and Ishikawa diagrams) but a mention of  the Six Sigma approach to end-to-end problem resolution (and process improvement) is long-overdue.

Known …

Debugging With Six Sigma Ishikawa

Back in September 2009 (that seems so long ago!) I wrote an article on problem solving using the 5 Whys technique. Some correspondents suggested that 5 Whys was a trivial/obvious technique, but they were missing the point somewhat – sometim…

Fat Fingers

I just looked at some code I had written a few months ago. It categorized things based on a bunch of criteria. At the end of the data step I output the categories that did not fit into a definition bucket nicely:if bucket in(12,11,10,7,6,5,4) then ou…

Inspecting SAS macro variables in SAS Enterprise Guide

The SAS macro variable “inspector” is a custom task that plugs into SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. You can use it to view the current values for all SAS macro variables that are defined within your SAS session. You can also evaluate “immediate” macro expressions in a convenient quick view window. […]

To attach() or not attach(): that is the question

R objects that reside in other R objects can require a lot of typing to access. For example, to refer to a variable x in a dataframe df, one could type df$x. This is no problem when the dataframe and variable names are short, but can become burdensom…