It is said that a good programmer should be lazy. And what about a good programming teacher? We dare to say the same is true. This article will show that you can be lazy and also be able to teach an entire SAS course at the same time!

The aim of the article is to present a variety of examples of how to do one of the most common data processing programming tasks, table look-up, in SAS. We don’t assess these methods from a benchmarking or performance perspective but rather present them as an intellectual puzzle. Our goal is to explore how much SAS syntax (statements, PROCs, functions, etc.) could be taught using only one exercise. If you are a fan of unorthodox SAS programming, curious to learn about the variety and flexibility of the SAS language, or an innovative SAS teacher - this article is for you!

Bio:

Bartosz Jabłoński, PhD – but everyone calls him Bart. Bart is a mathematician working and playing with data, an open-minded analyst, and science enthusiast. He is a consultant, seasoned SAS professional (since 2009), and SAS teacher. He gained experience in various domains including: higher education, telecommunication, clinical trials, and banking; mostly by resolving various "analytic tasks" using (among others) advanced SAS techniques mixed with domain knowledge or statistical methods. Since 2015 he has led the SAS Programming course at the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science (Warsaw University of Technology). Bart is a speaker at various local and international SAS-related conferences; a Certified SAS trainer; and an author, designer, and developer of the SAS Packages Framework, which allows users to create SAS Packages – a practical, organised, devops oriented, and "easy to work with" code sharing medium for SAS. He's not afraid to admit he's a SAS geek… an active member of Polish SAS Users Group (PolSUG) who also has "third and a half dan in sasensei". To turn on Bart’s internal problem solver mode just say: "you probably can't do something like this in SAS…"

Quentin McMullen has more than 25 years of experience programming in SAS, primarily in healthcare, clinical trials, and related fields. He is an active participant in online SAS communities (particularly communities.sas.com, SAS-L, and Stack Overflow), and is Vice President of the Boston Area SAS Users Group (BASUG).