budd@arizona.UUCP (tim budd) (03/16/85)
<who are you? I am the new number two> Here is a mystery I would eagerly like an answer to. The Little Smalltalk system has a feature whereby the current environment can be saved in a file and later restored. It does this by basically copying everything from the start of the users data space (found by carefully inserting a global declaration in the first location of the first loaded module) to _end. This works fine on the 780 *. On several other machines, however, (examples are 11/70, DecPro 350, IBM PC/IX, PE 11/32), the next time one does a ``system()'' call following the load one receives the cryptic message xxx: is not an identifier from the sh fired off by the system, and the call doesn't work. Even stranger, on at least one machine (the 11/70) this does not happen if the program is given by a path, only if it is in the current directory. Obviously, something is being clobbered that shouldn't be, but what? and where? * note: this works because nothing on the stack points into memory at the point the save and/or load is performed, and there are no open files. Also clearly there are machines (such as the HP 9000) where nothing of the sort will work.