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To change Row 1 into a variable in SAS without using proc SQL, you can use the TRANSPOSE procedure. Here is an example of SAS code that demonstrates this:

/* create a sample dataset */
data sample;
  input var1 var2 var3;
  datalines;
  1 2 3
  4 5 6
  7 8 9
  ;

/* transpose the dataset */
proc transpose data=sample out=transposed;
  var _all_;
run;

/* rename the variable created by TRANSPOSE */
data transposed;
  set transposed;
  if _name_ = 'COL1' then newvar = col1;
  keep newvar;
run;

/* view the resulting dataset */
proc print data=transposed;
run;

In this example, the TRANSPOSE procedure is used to flip the rows and columns of the sample dataset. This creates a new dataset called transposed, which has one observation per original column and one variable per original row.

To convert Row 1 into a variable, we can use a DATA step to rename the first column of transposed to "newvar" and keep only that variable. The resulting dataset should have one observation and one variable, which corresponds to Row 1 of the original dataset.

Note that this approach assumes that Row 1 of the original dataset contains unique values. If there are duplicate values or missing values in Row 1, the resulting variable may not be meaningful.