A SAS date value is the number of days from January 1, 1960, to the given date.

In addition to tracking time intervals, SAS date and time values can be used in calculations like other numeric values. This lets you calculate values that involve dates much more easily than in other programming languages.

SAS automatically makes adjustments for leap years.

The SAS informat MMDDYYw. reads dates such as 10222001, 10/22/01, or 10-22-01. In this case, the field width is eight.

The minimum acceptable field width for the TIMEw. informat is five. If you specify a w value less than five, you receive an error message in the SAS log.

In the time value of a date and time expression, you must use delimiters to separate the values for hour, minutes, and seconds.

To find the number of days spanned by two dates, subtract the first day from the last day and add one. Because SAS date values are numeric values, they can easily be used in calculations.