[ESS] ESS[SAS]: Submit region starting new SAS session?

[Erin Jonaitis]

Hello!

I'm a fairly new emacs user, a very new user of ESS[SAS], and an extremely new subscriber to this list (so apologies if I violate list etiquette). I'm using GNU emacs 23.4.1 (2012-06-05) and SAS 9.3 on Unix (SunOS 5.10).

I have noticed that code which works when submitted as an entire file will not work when I submit it region by region. Here is an example:

libname mylib "/.";

data temp; set mylib.temp; run;

Assume that I have a directory as specified in libname and there is a SAS dataset called temp in it -- my code works properly when I submit the whole thing, but if I run just the first line and then the second, it tells me that "mylib" is not defined.

Based on the behavior of the log files -- the second submission creates a log file that overwrites the first -- I think what is going on is that it's starting a new SAS session with each submission. Why might it be doing this? I find I make fewer programming errors if I test things incrementally rather than running all my code in batch mode, so I would really like to find a fix to this.

The only other clue I have is a pair of warnings I get on every submission:

NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.REGSTRY. WORK.REGSTRY will be opened 
    instead.
NOTE: All registry changes will be lost at the end of the session.

WARNING: Unable to copy SASUSER registry to WORK registry. Because of 
    this, you will not see registry customizations during this session.
NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.PROFILE. WORK.PROFILE will be opened 
    instead.
NOTE: All profile changes will be lost at the end of the session.

I googled those warnings separately and found they're commonly associated with a corrupt SAS profile, but unfortunately the recommended fix did not fix anything (after deleting the iffy profile, it just restored itself and the error persisted). I am not sure whether this is related or not.

Has anyone here seen the behavior I'm describing? Any ideas about a fix? 


Thanks in advance,

Erin Jonaitis