When appropriate, examples of programming statements are given. All SAS variable names are eight characters or less in length. Other characters in the name may be letters, the numbers 0 through 9, or underscores. No other special characters or blanks are allowed.
Numeric variables have quantifiable values composed of numbers.
Their length is from two to eight bytes, with eight as the default value. Their length is from one to 200 characters, with a default value of eight. If this delimiter is not present, SAS will continue reading lines as the current statement until a semicolon is encountered. At least one error message will result. Programming statements may begin in column one or may be indented.