Everyone in the computer science field (should) eventually learn or realize that any recursive function can be rewritten as an iterative process with the aid of a stack. Since a SAS Data Step is iterative, it’s fairly easy to look up children of a tree node in metadata, but nearly impossible to recursively look up [...]
The following is my attempt at SAS Golf, where in a Data Step, I try to list the associations of a metadata object to the log. This is basically just taking advantage of combining SAS for loops with SAS while loops. I thought it was cool. Usually I find myself doing this with metadata_getnasn, metadata_getnprp, [...]
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 [...]