Writing a Portable SAS Macro

One aspect of writing macros for SAS is to try to make them portable. There are two aspects of this: First, writing the process in a manner that is generalizable so that there's a need for the macro to be portable; second, writing the program so it works on multiple platforms of SAS and operating systems (OS).

The first task I've always seemed to excel at. With almost 90 general-use macros hosted on my site, I have a macro for many useful, reusable processes. I've written code with these macros where most of the code is simply calls to these macros. They save a lot of time and repetitious code.

The second task, however, has always been a bit elusive, especially since I am unable to run my macros on different OSs. A SAS license would be required on each OS to do so, even if I had UNIX, z/OS, OpenVMS, and Windows installed where I could access them. This creates some significant problems with this last task. As a result, I have come up with a few strategies to get around the issue.

The first and most powerful is to re-write any OS-specific function or process in the native SAS language. This can be tricky since a simple process like obtaining a list of files in a directory can be a simple, one-line piece of code for the OS, but several steps (and sometimes more limited functionality) for SAS.

Another step is to simply modify the macro to run several different versions of the same thing depending on the OS. SAS has two automatic macro variables that define the operating system, SYSSCP and SYSSCPL, that can be used to run conditional code that will work in the OS. This is still tricky, since I have no way to test the code to see if it works. It helps to review help documentation, examples online, and forums for those OSs, but I'm still never 100% certain that it will work as expected.

For this last part, I rely on the users out there. I received several rounds of feedback recently on my CheckLog macro, which reviews the SAS log, an external log (even non-SAS), and an entire directory of logs, with several additional features to tweak how it runs and how it notifies the user about issues. (See the documentation for more detail.) These users were able to provide specific feedback about what didn't work, and they were able to test new versions on their system quickly. Through this process, I was able to modify the macro significantly, and now it runs on all SAS-supported OSs (UNIX, z/OS, OpenVMS, and Windows). And the users have a better utility that fits their needs with insignificant cost.

Using this model for developing macros, it could be possible to add to the standard SAS library with new and very useful processes. So if you're a SAS user, join in and contribute to the community by publishing general-use macros or by testing and providing feedback to others who have done so!