I love our readers – especially when they have a great idea they want to share. Quentin McMullen, who has been programming in SAS for 15 years, primarily in clinical trials and public health submitted such an idea recently. Several months ago he left a comment asking about checking the log from a stored processes.  I didn’t really have a good idea – so he came up with one!  Please add your thoughts in the Comments section – he wants feedback from other experts!

Quentin does not have his own blog to plug (yet), but if you want to chat with him about log checking in person, catch him at NESUG this November in Baltimore, where he will be presenting a simple data verification macro, %assert.

Ignore the Log at Your Own Peril

When I was a newbie SAS programmer, I was always afraid of making mistakes.  The most embarrassing mistakes were when my boss found an error in some report or dataset I had delivered, and the reason for the error became obvious as soon as I looked at the log and noticed a big red ERROR: line (okay, when I started in v6.12 the log wasn’t actually colored, but you get my point).   From those painful experiences, I quickly learned to review the log before I look at my results.  And like many programmers, I wrote a %logcheck macro that I invoke at the end of a program to automatically parse the log looking for errors, warnings, and problematic notes. 

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