title: SAS - Define array of letters
body: <p>Is there a shorthand in SAS for defining a sequence of letters in an array?  </p>
  
  <p>Many languages possess a mechanism for doing so easily and I imagine SAS does too, although I'm unable to find a reference for it.  </p>
  
  <p>For instance, in R I could do</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; x &lt;- letters[1:4]
  &gt; x
  [1] "a" "b" "c" "d"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In Python, one way is</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import string
  &gt;&gt;&gt; list(string.ascii_lowercase[:4])
  ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In SAS, I currently am having to list the letters explicitly,</p>
  
  <pre><code>data _null_;
    array letters (4) $ _temporary_ ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd');
    do i = 1 to hbound(letters);
      put letters(i);
    end;
  run;
  </code></pre>