Lots of good suggestions here.
Several people have asked why we want to do this. As Tom has guessed, the
issue is a need for widely variable amounts of storage. We have a series of
DC-COBOL programs that pass data to and from each other. The size of the
data varies from tiny to huge. There is no upper limit, other than the
amount of storage available. Scratch and queue records require defining the
maximum size in the program, which is not practical in this case. So we use
storage instead. I would like to do something similar with ADS dialogs so
that they can communicate with the DC-COBOL programs.