A00-215 Exam Dumps : SAS Certified Associate: Programming Fundamentals Using SAS 9.4

The DROP statement during the compilation phase of the DATA step flags variables in the Program Data Vector (PDV) to be dropped when the data set is output. This means that although the variables exist in the PDV during the DATA step execution, they will not be written to the output data set. The DROP statement does not affect the order of variables (which is the purpose of the ORDER= data set option), nor does it remove variables from the input data set or prevent them from being created in the PDV.

References:

• SAS documentation on the DROP statement.

The SAS program provided includes a PROC FORMAT step that defines a numeric format called Syn and applies this format to the variable answer in the PROC PRINT step. The format maps the value '0' to 'No', '1' to 'Yes', and all other values to 'Unknown'.

However, there is a syntax error in the PROC FORMAT step: it uses a dollar sign before Syn, which is used to indicate character formats, but the format is defined for numeric values (0 and 1). Therefore, when applying this format to the answer variable in PROC PRINT, it should not have a dollar sign, it should be format answer Syn.; instead of format answer $yn.;.

The correct output based on the given code, assuming the error with the dollar sign is corrected, would be as follows:

• For numeric values 0 and 1, 'No' and 'Yes' would be displayed, respectively.
• For any other numeric value, 'Unknown' would be displayed.
• For character values, the format would not apply and the actual values would be displayed.

Given that the values in the 'answer' column are numeric, the program will format them according to the defined Syn format. Thus, the report corresponding to Option D, which shows numeric values unformatted, would be the one created. This indicates that the format was not applied because of the syntax error with the dollar sign.

References:

• SAS 9.4 documentation for the FORMAT procedure and statement: SAS Help Center: PROC FORMAT