Paper HW05 Programming Squared (Writing Programs that Write Programs)

This paper will demonstrate several techniques using Base SASâ and macros that will take your programming skills to a new level by giving you the power to write programs that write programs. These simple techniques, which are powerful used alone, are awesome when combined. Using these techniques when your application is appropriate, you can write one program that will act as though you wrote dozens of individual programs. These programming techniques will give you the ability to write more robust, highly flexible, intelligent programs that can extract data from little known sources, make decisions, write and execute program code depending less on user input. Programs using these techniques are more difficult to debug, but once validated, can be used over and over again by many projects. Although the techniques are simple, this paper is aimed at experienced programmers who know when it would be appropriate and efficient to use them