About This Book :: SAS(R) 9.3 Macro Language: Reference

Overview of Syntax Conventions for the SAS Language

SAS uses standard conventions in the documentation of syntax for SAS language elements. These conventions enable you to easily identify the components of SAS syntax. The conventions can be divided into these parts:

syntax components
style conventions
references to SAS libraries and external files

Syntax Components

The components of the syntax for most language elements include a keyword and arguments. For some language elements only a keyword is necessary. For other language elements the keyword is followed by an equal sign (=).

Note: In most cases, example code in SAS documentation is written in lowercase with a monospace font. You can use uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case in the code that you write.

Style Conventions

The style conventions that are used in documenting SAS syntax include uppercase bold, uppercase, and italic:

UPPERCASE BOLD

identifies SAS keywords such as the names of functions or statements. In the following example, the keyword ERROR is written in uppercase bold:

ERROR<message>;

UPPERCASE

identifies arguments that are literals. In the following example of the CMPMODEL= system option, the literals include BOTH, CATALOG, and XML:

CMPMODEL = BOTH | CATALOG | XML

italics

identifies arguments or values that you supply. Items in italics represent user-supplied values that are either non-literal arguments or nonliteral values that are assigned to an argument.

Items in italics can also be the generic name for a list of arguments from which you can choose (for example, attribute-list). If more than one of an item in italics can be used, the items are expressed as item-1, ..., item-n.

References to SAS Libraries and External Files

Many SAS statements and other language elements refer to SAS libraries and external files. You can choose whether to make the reference through a logical name (a libref or fileref) or use the physical filename enclosed in quotation marks. If you use a logical name, you usually have a choice of using a SAS statement (LIBNAME or FILENAME) or the operating environment's control language to make the association. Several methods of referring to SAS libraries and external files are available, and some of these methods depend on your operating environment.

In the examples that use external files, SAS documentation uses the italicized phrase file-specification. In the examples that use SAS libraries, SAS documentation uses the italicized phrase SAS-library. Note that SAS-library is enclosed in quotation marks:

infile file-specification obs = 100;
libname libref 'SAS-library';