Introduction to Packages for the TSMODEL Procedure

A programming object, a fundamental concept in object-oriented programming (OO) and analogous to an object found in nature, is the description of the state and behavior of a system. For example, a dog is a real-world object that has both a state (name, age, weight, fur color, tail length, running speed, number of teeth, friendliness level, and so on) and behavior (running, biting, eating, hunting, wagging its tail, whining, sleeping, tearing the sofa, and so on). A programming object is similar to a real-world object, but it stores its state as internal variables called fields and communicates its behavior to other objects via a set of functions called methods.

Many of the objects in the TSMODEL procedure packages are collector objects that are specifically designed to postprocess the output of other objects and then store the results in an output table. This postprocessing and storing the results can help accelerate your development process. These objects are called collectors because they "gather" the results of other objects and store them for future reference.

Conversely, some other objects are specifically designed to retrieve the data that have been stored in an output table by collectors and make those data available to your custom SAS code. These objects are called repeater objects.