Why did SAS date 1960?

Why January 1, 1960? One story has it that the founders of SAS wanted to use the approximate birth date of the IBM 370 system, and they chose January 1, 1960 as an easy- to-remember approximation. Many database programs maintain their dates as a value relative to some fixed point in time.

How will SAS store date time value in SAS?

SAS dates are stored as simple integer numbers. SAS time/datetimes are stored as decimal numbers to include 10th and 100th of seconds. For time values the integer part is the number of seconds from midnight. For datetime the integer part equals the number of seconds from January 1,1960.

How do you define length in SAS?

specifies a numeric constant for storing variable values. For numeric and character variables, this constant is the maximum number of bytes stored in the variable. For numeric variables, 2 to 8 bytes or 3 to 8 bytes, depending on your operating environment.

How do I use Intnx in SAS?

The syntax for the INTNX function is as follows: sas_date_value = intnx(‘Interval’, start_date, number of intervals to add); The available intervals are Day, Week, Month, Qtr (quarter) or Year and must be enclosed in quotes. The start date must be a SAS date and the number of intervals must be an integer value.

What is Intck function in SAS?

Returns the number of interval boundaries of a given kind that lie between two SAS dates, times, or timestamp values encoded as DOUBLE.

What are SAS variables?

In SAS, there are two types of variables: numeric and character. Numeric variables are variables that store numbers. Missing values for numeric variables appear as a period (.). Character variables (also known as string variables) contain information that the system recognizes as text.

What are SAS formats?

A format is a layout specification for how a variable should be printed or displayed. SAS contains many internal formats and informats, or user defined formats and informats can be constructed using PROC FORMAT.

How is the date before 1960 represented in SAS?

SAS represents a date internally as the number of days between January 1, 1960 and the specified date. Dates before 1960 are represented with negative numbers. A SAS date value is a numeric variable.

What’s the definition of a SAS date value?

Definitions SAS date value is a value that represents the number of days between January 1, 1960, and a specified date. SAS can perform calculations on dates ranging from A.D. 1582 to A.D. 19,900. Dates before January 1, 1960, are negative numbers; dates after are positive numbers.

How many leap year days are there in SAS?

SAS can perform calculations on dates ranging from A.D. 1582 to A.D. 19,900. Dates before January 1, 1960, are negative numbers; dates after are positive numbers. SAS date values account for all leap year days, including the leap year day in the year 2000.

How to do a date time converter in SAS?

To use it, enter a date value in the first text box, and the unformatted date value (i.e., the number of days since 1/1/1960) that SAS associates with that number will appear in the second text box. The calculator also works in reverse. We have also added a SAS Datetime Calculator and Converter, also available for free in this post (above).