Overview
The SAS System is an integrated system of software products (provided by the SAS Institute) that enables the programmer to perform:
- data entry, retrieval, and management
- report writing and graphics
- statistical and mathematical analysis
- business planning, forecasting, and decision support
- operations research and project management
- quality improvement
- applications development.
In addition, SAS integrates with many SAS business solutions that enable large scale business functions, such as data warehousing and data mining, human resources management and decision support, financial management and decision support, and others.
Base SAS
The core of the SAS System is the so called Base SAS Software, which is used to manage data. SAS procedures software analyses and reports the data. The Macro facility is a tool for extending and customizing SAS software programs and for reducing text in programs. The DATA step debugger is a programming tool that helps find logic problems in DATA step programs. The Output Delivery System (ODS) is a system that delivers output in a variety of easy-to-access formats, such as SAS data sets, listing files, or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The SAS windowing environment is an interactive, graphical user interface used to easily run and test SAS programs.
Description of SAS
Like other database-oriented fourth-generation programming languages such as SQL or Focus, SAS assumes a default file structure, and automates the process of identifying files to the operating system, opening the input file, reading the next record, opening the output file, writing the next record, and closing the files. This allows the user/programmer to concentrate on the details of working with the data within each record, in effect working almost entirely within an implicit program loop that runs for each record. Other procedures operate on the dataset as a whole, for instance printing or statistical analysis, and merely require the user/programmer to identify the dataset.
Compared to general-purpose programming languages, this structure allows the user/programmer to be less familiar with the technical details of the data and how it is stored, and relatively more familiar with the information contained in the data. This blurs the line between user and programmer, appealing to individuals who fall more into the 'business' or 'research' area and less in the 'information technology' area. This in turn has the double edged result of allowing rapid answers to business or research questions, even ones requring several iterations to get from the initial results to a final answer; but also contributing to the construction of a large body of badly written and impossible to maintain source code.
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