I would recommend the opposite, going from FB to VB.
The process of removing any line numbers in 73-80 is simpler than text flowing all the wide code to within cols 1-72
VB would also work in the SAS8 context.
SASAUTOS concatenation can be achieved within the SAS session rather than the JCL. The style is
option sasautos= ( ddname ddn2 "physical DSN" etc "..." ) ;
There are a SAS Usage notes on the topic: see
http://support.sas.com/kb/11/929.html and
http://support.sas.com/kb/12/199.html which refers to options S= and S2= which are also involved.
PeterC