You can program easily and efficiently with the many features for arithmetic and character expressions in SAS/IML software. You can access a wide variety of built-in functions and subroutines designed to make your programming fast, easy, and efficient. Because SAS/IML software is part of the SAS System, you can access SAS data sets or external files with an extensive set of data processing commands for data input and output, and you can edit existing SAS data sets or create new ones.

SAS/IML software has a complete set of control statements, such as DO/END, START/FINISH, iterative DO, IF-THEN/ELSE, GOTO, LINK, PAUSE, and STOP, giving you all of the commands necessary for execution control and program modularization. See the section Control Statements for details.