ST590G -- FALL 2012 
     
  Class Exercise #6 -- Tuesday, 23 October 2012

  Our Group ___________________________________________________

  From time to time, I may have to read some dates that are written as
    October 23, 2012
  where I really want the month number so that I can make a SAS date.
  I can use our character manipulation tools to pull out the pieces, 
  but the month is a problem.

  1) Write the code to create a SAS format that takes the name of a 
  month and produces the (character) month number.  For example, take
  the character string 'October' and produce the character string '10'
  (so it's a character-character format).  Do this WITHOUT writing or
  reading a file.  (Hint: The format monname. gives the month name.)

  Recall back in September, when we were first learning about character
  functions, the file 'fball.dates' had dates with the day of the week
  smushed together with the month (name), day, and year.  We wrote code
  (see sep12.ex2) to pull those apart and wrote some clunky code to 
  convert the month name to a number with 'IF' statements.

  2) Read the dates from 'fball.dates' and parse out the month name
  and use your format in (1) to get the month number and a SAS date.

  3) Check to see if the day of the week given in the file is correct. 
  (Hint: downame.)

  Submit your output and log.  Don't forget your toes!