You can use PL/I with CICS facilities to write application programs (transactions) for CICS subsystems. If you do this, CICS provides facilities to the PL/I program that would normally be provided directly by the operating system. These facilities include most data management facilities and all job and task management facilities.
You must observe the following restrictions on PL/I CICS programs:
Although PUT FILE(SYSPRINT) is permitted under CICS, you should generally not use it in production programs as it will degrade performance.
Since the CICS EIB address is only generated by either the CICS translator or the PL/I CICS preprocessor for an OPTIONS(MAIN) program, it is the user’s responsibility to establish the addressability to the EIB for the OPTIONS(FETCHABLE) routine.
Addressability can be achieved either by using this command:
EXEC CICS ADDRESS EIB(DFHEIPTR)
or by passing the EIB address as an argument to the CALL statement that invokes the external procedure.