SAS User Group International 31

I submitted, and was accepted to present at the 31st SAS User Group International conferenceBeginning with 2007, the conference was renamed as SAS Global Forum. in San Francisco, CA.

Here’s a local copy of the paper.

Here’s the abstract:

Just because documenting programs isn’t fun, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. You’ve probably had to work off programs written several years before by someone who wasn’t exactly faithful about program documentation. This makes for a headache when trying to figure out what the point of a program is and why it was coded the way it was. Fast-forward a few years…will your successors be frustrated by your lacking documentation, or will they be grateful that you spent the time to describe the program? Perhaps programmers feel that by not documenting programs they have more job-security, or maybe it’s form of hazing; either way, it didn’t help you. How will it help your successors?

This paper moves beyond the simple practice of documenting programs to developing and implementing a system of automatic documentation. The results, in native SAS® data set, can then be put through various PROCs to practically any format to look like you spent hours drudging through your programs.

While the collection of steps described in this paper were developed using SAS 9.1.3 originally running under Windows 2000 and then Windows XP, the basic concepts (and hopefully much of the code) should be transferable to other versions of SAS and other operating systems.

I originally did a dumb and used “predecessors” when I meant to use “successors”. I regret the error.