What the HEX. is going on?

Have you ever had to compare two values that appear to be the same but they are different? That is likely the result of the way data is stored using floating-point representation.

A great way reveal differences is to use the HEX16. format. See the below example and notice that the right most value between the x1hex and x2hex columns are different. The issue can be resolved by using the ROUND() function to mitigate the floating-point difference.

data x ;
  x1 = .3 ;
  x2 = 3 * .1 ;
  xcomp = x1 - x2 ;
  x1hex = put( x1, hex16. ) ;
  x2hex = put( x2, hex16. ) ;
  r1 = round( x1, .00000001 ) ;
  r2 = round( x2, .00000001 ) ;
  rcomp = r1 - r2 ;
run ;

For more information on numerical accuracy in SAS software, see this link.