In trying to make my code more readable, I face the following situation.
Consider a data step in which you want to select only observations which have a value for variable. It seems there are two ways to do this using a WHERE statement: express the variable alone or use the MISSING function.
For example,
Case 1. Where VARIABLE
data where_var;
set sashelp.electric;
where AllPower;
run;
Case 2. Where not missing(VARIABLE)
data where_not_missing;
set sashelp.electric;
where not missing(AllPower);
run;
These produce the same result. However, I'm unsure whether this is necessarily the case.
- Are these functionally equivalent?
- Is Case 1 merely syntactic sugar for Case 2?
- Are there instances when they will produce different results?
