You may need to use a line pointer to read such data. A line pointer is like a column pointer, except that it specifies the line on which SAS should begin reading the data. A slash (/) tells SAS to skip to the next line, and # number tell SAS to go to that line of an observation's data to resume reading data. If the data above were stored in A:GRADES.TXT, a dataset could be created in SAS as follows: