>keywords can also be used as variable names (thus you can define variables IF, ELSE, THEN and have a legal SAS statement like “IF ELSE=IF THEN IF=ELSE ELSE THE

>keywords can also be used as variable names (thus you can define variables IF, ELSE, THEN and have a legal SAS statement like “IF ELSE=IF THEN IF=ELSE ELSE THEN=IF;”) OK, so have a preprocessor check for variables[0] with keyword names and change them to an unused name. Problem solved. [0] e.g. an X or Y in "X=Y"