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From: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ARGV in the environment
Message-ID: <1428@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-May-87 15:35:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.1428
Posted: Fri May 29 15:35:53 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 30-May-87 12:13:06 EDT
References: <741@atari.UUCP>
Reply-To: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vincent Manis)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science
Lines: 26

In article <741@atari.UUCP> apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) writes:
>For now, I propose that the environment variable in question be called
>PBP, and that its value be the decimal string of digits making up the
>parent's basepage.  The reason for this is that almost all libraries
>have an atol() function, where not all have an atolx() function. 

This is a really good suggestion, but it can be improved by noting that the
major goal is to make the whole argument transmission scheme a bit more
reliable. (Why DRI didn't do it right the first time is a matter I don't
consider worthy of discussion.) However, under the above proposal, the user
who accidentally sets an environment variable "PBP" (meaning, perhaps,
"Print Blank Pages", as far as his/her program is concerned) to 5 could get
anomalous behaviour (of the sort discussed in Allan's article). It is worth
noting that the base page pointer is only going to be passed from one program
to another; therefore I suggest that the name "PBP " (space included) might 
result in slightly-less error prone behaviour.

-----
Vincent Manis                {seismo,uw-beaver}!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!manis
Dept. of Computer Science    manis@cs.ubc.cdn
Univ. of British Columbia    manis%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa  
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5      manis@ubc.csnet
(604) 228-6770 or 228-3061

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