Hi Ron, This is one of my favorite tricks in SAS. However, not only it can be used for grabbing a number of observations in a data set, it can also be used for injecting a whole data structure into a SAS data step without disturbing the data step flow. Try running the following code:

data ABC;
make='Toyota';
run;

data MYDATA;
if 0 then set SASHELP.CARS;
set ABC;
run;

I call it applying a SAS data template. For more details, see my blog post Simplify data preparation using SAS data templates.