I'm gonna buck the trend here and ask a simple question...

Is it *really* that hard to add a field to a copylib and recompile, esp if you
keep a recompile job?

I suppose it all depends how many Cobol programs you have. If you have 50
programs, what if you simply compile them all? No thinking, easy to do, and
fast on most modern machines.

Any solution is no good though without assesing the impact of the DB change.
You can have the correct list (or @) all you want, but ANY program might have
changes to be made based on the field or data you added or changed.

So, whatever list structure you use, it isn't good enough. You STILL must
decide what programs are affected.