Basic SAS interview questions

1. What is the effect of the OPTIONS statement ERRORS=1?
2. What’s the difference between VAR A1 - A4 and VAR A1 — A4?
3. What do the SAS log messages "numeric values have been converted to character" mean? What are the implications?
4. Why is a STOP statement needed for the POINT= option on a SET statement?
5. How do you control the number of observations and/or variables read or written?
6. Approximately what date is represented by the SAS date value of 730?
7. How would you remove a format that has been permanently associated with a variable??
8. What does the RUN statement do?
9. Why is SAS considered self-documenting?
10. What areas of SAS are you most interested in?
11. Briefly describe 5 ways to do a "table lookup" in SAS.
12. What versions of SAS have you used (on which platforms)?
13. What are some good SAS programming practices for processing very large data sets?
14. What are some problems you might encounter in processing missing values? In Data steps? Arithmetic? Comparisons? Functions? Classifying data?
15. How would you create a data set with 1 observation and 30 variables from a data set with 30 observations and 1 variable?
16. What is the different between functions and PROCs that calculate the same simple descriptive statistics?
17. If you were told to create many records from one record, show how you would do this using arrays and with PROC TRANSPOSE?
18. What are _numeric_ and _character_ and what do they do?
19. How would you create multiple observations from a single observation?
20. For what purpose would you use the RETAIN statement?
21. What is a method for assigning first.VAR and last.VAR to the BY group variable on unsorted data?
22. What is the order of application for output data set options, input data set options and SAS statements?
23. What is the order of evaluation of the comparison operators: + - * / ** ( ) ?
24. How could you generate test data with no input data?
25. How do you debug and test your SAS programs?
26. What can you learn from the SAS log when debugging?
27. What is the purpose of _error_?
28. How can you put a "trace" in your program?
29. Are you sensitive to code walk-throughs, peer review, or QC review?
30. Have you ever used the SAS Debugger?
31. What other SAS features do you use for error trapping and data validation?
32. How does SAS handle missing values in: assignment statements, functions, a merge, an update, sort order, formats, PROCs?
33. How many missing values are available? When might you use them?
34. How do you test for missing values?
35. How are numeric and character missing values represented internally?