When coding for loops in SAS, one neat thing to remember is that all of the parts of it are optional.

start <TO stop> <BY increment> <WHILE(expression) | UNTIL(expression)>

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/62618/HTML/default/a000201276.htm

So in another language, what might be

for(int i=0;i < max;i++) {

In SAS, you can leave out the "by 1", since it's the default increment. So this would be

do i=0 to max;

What's fun is in SAS you can combine a Repeat-Until/Do-While loop with a for loop. This might be useful if for some reason you don't set the var "max" until you've iterated through the loop once, such as in this case, where "metadata_getnobj" returns a negative on fail, but otherwise returns the number of objects that match the query.

do i=1 by 1 until (i >= objs);
  rc=metadata_getnobj("omsobj:SASLibrary?@Libref='MYLIBREF'",i,uri);
  if rc>=0 then objs=rc;

  rc=metadata_getnasn(uri,"LibraryConnection",1,uri);
  if rc>=0 then leave;
end;

This code loops through all the libraries in the metadata with libref='MYLIBREF', and exits with a URI for the first one it sees with at least one LibraryConnection association. This is useful when you have a remote library pointing to a local library and they both have the same name and you want a URI to the remote one.

Another cool thing with FOR loops in SAS is iteration through lists. In Java, say you have a block like this:

for(String x : new String[] { "a","b","c" }) {
  System.out.println("x="+x);
}

In SAS, this is simply

do x="a","b","c";
  put x=;
end;

In SAS, every field/variable in a table/dataset can be given a format. This format tells SAS how to display the data. The following datastep will create a table called “formatted” having 1 row containing 3 variables: x, y, and d.

data formatted;
  x=9000;
  y=42;
  now=16761;
  format x comma6.;
  format y dollar5.;
  format now date7.;
  put x=;
  put y=;
  put now=;
run;

Additionally it prints to the log the formatted values.

x=9,000
y=$42
now=21NOV05

In SAS you can also create your own formats, and you can assign these formats to whichever datasets you like. However if that format goes away for some reason and you try to look at the data again, you will get this error:

ERROR: Informat $YOURFMT not found or couldn't be loaded for variable YOURVAR.

You can get around this by turning off this option

options nofmterr;

Then your ERROR turns into NOTE, and things work normally, except when you try to view the data you see it unformatted. This could be useful, however, if you find yourself in a situation like this:

data _null_;
  a=20.0000001;
  b=20.000001;
  format a dollar4.2;
  format b dollar4.2;
  put a= b=;
  if(a=b) then put 'matches';
   else put 'no match';
run;

Runs and outputs:

a=20.0 b=20.0
no match

At any rate, there are times in SAS when you simply want to remove all the formats from a dataset. This can be done in one line in a datastep:

data unformatted;
  set formatted;
  format _all_;
run;

I’ve been out of the loop on straight Java programming for a while, so this is probably obvious to a lot of people, and has been for a long time. But on the off chance that I’m not the only other idiot out there, I’ll post this.

The old way of instantiating a List in Java was like this:

List strings = Arrays.asList(new String[]{"foo","bar"});

In Java 5, templates were introduced, so I had to change to doing this:

List<String> strings = Arrays.asList(new String[]{"foo","bar"});

It just occurred to me that with variable-length methods, I can simply call asList like this:

List<String> strings = Arrays.asList("foo","bar");