The SAS language is a 4GL that underpins the SAS system, a suite of products centered around data processing and statistical procedures. For questions about code, please include your code and some data to reproduce your problem, either in datalines/cards statements or using a sashelp dataset like sashelp.class or sashelp.cars.
The SAS System is a proprietary suite of products used for business intelligence, data warehousing, data processing, and statistical analysis, across many industries, but particularly pharmaceuticals, finance and telecoms. It is available for (and often acting as a bridge between) mainframe, UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms.
The SAS System is a 4th generation programming environment, in that it includes a fully featured GUI with many user tasks able to be accomplished without coding. The SAS language itself is more powerful than the typical query language available in 4GLs, being more similar to a scripting language such as Python combined with built-in SQL and SQL-type queries.
SAS programs typically consist of two types of steps: data steps and proc steps. A data step creates a new data file or modifies an existing data file. Data steps can also serve to create user reports. Proc steps allow users to analyze data and provide user reports, such as summary statistics, charts of data, and correlations between variables. In addition SAS has ODS for Output in various formats like html, excel and pdf.
SAS also includes a macro language (also found in sas-macro) to conditionally control program code and improve readability.
SAS University Edition is an academic and free download for the SAS language available at http://support.sas.com/software/products/university-edition/
Questions about SAS that are on topic are questions about programming in SAS (writing code), questions about interacting with the programming environments related to SAS (Base SAS, Enterprise Guide, SAS Studio), or questions about SAS-related tools that are used in conjunction with programming (such as the prompt interface used in a programming context).
Questions about various SAS visual tools (such as SAS Visual Analytics) that are not used in conjunction with user written code, even if they could be used with writing code, are not on topic, nor is server administration. Please find appropriate communities for those questions, or the SAS community forums for any SAS related question that does not fit well here.
Well written SAS questions will include complete code to reproduce any issue you are having, and data to go with that code. Either use sashelp datasets (sashelp.class or sashelp.cars for example), or input your own data using a datalines statement, like so:
data have;
input x y z;
datalines;
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
;
run;
Examples of good questions that include datalines include How to use Boolean datatype in SAS? and PROC Report, multiple columns with same statistic. Examples of good questions using sashelp datasets include substr function with macro variable name and using where in sas macro when subsetting dataset.
