For CICS applications, Micro Focus strongly recommends that you avoid all PL/I I/O (such as READ, WRITE, etc...) and storage
               allocation (ALLOCATE and FREE) features, and use solely the facilities provided by CICS via EXEC CICS statements. This guideline
               does not apply to CICS batch programs (running under JCL) using the EXCI interface to communicate from the batch program to
               programs running under CICS.