<p>Sometimes it helps to get a different perspective.  What if, for instance, we were to replace every occurrence of &quot;R&quot; in this discussion by &quot;SAS&quot;?  In principle that shouldn't change the validity of any of the arguments pro or con.  To see what this would entail, think about what our site would be like if it were inundated with questions like <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/14423/sas-proc-sql-create-column">this one</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Vertically joining data in two (or more) data sets using proc sql. If each data set represents data gathered in different years data_2000, data_2001, data_2002, ...</p>
<p>If one wants to take a column from each file, but add a column populated with the year each row was taken from, creating the column is easy enough, but I don't know how to populate the values for each row.</p>
<p>I'd like to use a macro, give a list of files and years, let the macro generate the proc sql code to join given columns, et cetera</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Frankly, I'm not enthusiastic about that prospect.  I don't care whether such questions come from R, SAS, or whatever my favorite statistical computing platform happens to be at the moment: they are pedestrian and plainly <em>uninteresting.</em>  They belong somewhere else so that we can focus on statistics and data mining here without such distractions.</p>
