Regarding SAS environment differences (PC vs mainframe), suggest you seek technical assistance and guidance with colleagues who do use the IBM mainframe environment. And if you are unsure about whether it's done with TSO versus batch, honestly, that's pretty fundamental -- so are you helping someone else or doing the function/work-task yourself?
For my education, what is "FA list"?
Also, it's unclear what you mean by the statement: "...I wonder how one changes a sas program file into a sas dataset file."?? What
And, if you are moving to SAS PC, it's likely that you will have SAS environment "objects" -- to start, consider: SAS data libraries, FORMAT/FORMATC, INFORMAT, possibly various meta-data catalogs, stored views which need special attention to re-create them in the target OS environment, possibly mainframe-specific application specifications, some of which may need to be re-architected for the new OS platform. You may have SAS application (ODS code) that makes use of mainframe-specific output generation, such as HTML and graphic-images which need attention as well. Also your SAS application backup strategy will need serious review and revision, in my experience.
So, if you are migrating your current SAS mainframe environment to SAS PC, you need to consider the topic about migrating a different OS platform -- you will want to make use of the SAS support
http://support.sas.com/ website as well as these SAS forum archives.
Scott Barry
SBBWorks, Inc.