Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Programming Certification Practice Exam

What is an advantage of storing dates and times as SAS numeric date and time values?

1. They can easily be edited.

2. They can easily be read and understood.

3. They can be used in text strings like other character values.

4. They can be used in calculations like other numeric values.

The correct answer is: They can be used in calculations like other numeric values.

Storing dates and times as SAS numeric date and time values provides a significant advantage because these values can be directly used in calculations just like other numeric values. This allows for efficient arithmetic operations, such as calculating the difference between two dates, adding a specific number of days to a date, or determining the duration between two time points. This numeric representation facilitates various date and time manipulations that would be cumbersome if stored as character strings or in a non-numeric format. For instance, if you want to calculate how many days lie between two dates, you can simply subtract one numeric date value from another. Since SAS internally represents dates as the number of days since a baseline date (January 1, 1960) and times as the number of seconds since midnight, these operations are straightforward and computationally efficient. Other formats, like character strings, would require additional steps to parse the dates and convert or manipulate them for arithmetic, which is not only less efficient but also increases the risk of errors during such conversions. By utilizing numeric values, SAS allows users to leverage the full power of numerical computations on date and time data.