I'm trying to learn SAS, clearly. I came across a strange format and I haven't found an explanation of it via google. What is datafile1 doing in the statement below? Isn't there supposed to be Options there?
data dataset1 datafile1;
length col1 col2 $50.;
set c;
run;
datafile1 is a second output dataset. The data step you list in the question simply makes two output datasets that are identical, which is generally uninteresting - but you could do something like this:
data male female all;
set sashelp.class;
if sex eq 'F' then output female;
else if sex eq 'M' then output male;
output all;
run;
That outputs different rows to different datasets.
Dataset options would go like this:
data want (keep=name age);
set sashelp.class;
run;
They're compatible - you could do
data male(keep=name age) female(keep=name age) all(keep=name age sex);
set sashelp.class;
if sex eq 'F' then output female;
else if sex eq 'M' then output male;
output all;
run;