nice article Rick!
"data driven from a control file" is also an effective solution beyond simulation problems. The term describes an operational solution for a team managing some financial data (daily liquidity monitoring for the next 500 days, that I implemented to use SAS and other desktop tools). As the operational users were not SAS programmers it was helpful that a range in excel could be treated in SAS as a table (of name-value pairs). There was enough parameter validation (in SAS) to promptly reject inappropriate or invalid values in the spreadsheet range. No new operational users needed the steep learning curve into SAS.

So a big thankyou to the "data driven" concept - and the ability of "SAS/ACCESS to pc files" to define an excel workbook as a data library.