What is the result of using the DELETE statement in a DATA step?

Using the DELETE statement in a DATA step is specifically designed to remove observations from the dataset. When you use this statement, any observation that meets the specified criteria will be excluded from the output dataset that results from the DATA step. This means that the observations effectively do not appear in the final dataset when the DATA step is executed.

In this context, the DELETE statement allows for conditional deletions, so if you define certain conditions that observations must meet to be deleted, only those observations that satisfy the criteria will be removed.

For instance, if a programmer wants to exclude all records that have a value of zero in a specific variable, they can utilize the DELETE statement in combination with a conditional expression to achieve this. Therefore, stating that this statement deletes observations aligns perfectly with its intended function within SAS programming.