In this lesson, we learned how to write basic assignment statements, as well as use numeric SAS functions, in order to change the contents of our SAS data set. One thing you might have noticed is that almost all of our examples involved assignment statements that changed every observation in our data set. There may be situations, however, when you don't want to change every observation, but rather want to change just a subset of observations, those that meet a certain condition. To do so, you have to use if-then-else statements, which we'll learn about in the next lesson. In doing so, we'll also learn a few more good programming practices.

The homework for this lesson will give you practice with assignment statements and numeric functions so that you become even more familiar with how they work and can use them in your own SAS programming.