edstrom@UNCAEDU.BITNET (10/24/87)
About the proposal to pass environments via basepages: this is dangerous. I would suggest that the "clipboard" accesory/subroutine suite be used. This can be used for the purpose suggested but also has the advantages that: A: it will survive system crash or program failure so that a long chain of realted programs will not have to be restarted at the beginning (information is read/written to memory and/or disk). B: it is not half so esoteric as the methods that have been suggested. It can be used by relative novices through functionaly obvious subroutine calls like write_clip, read_clip or save_clip. I have a version for Alcyonm Megamax and Lattice, if anyone is interested. An added feature is that any type of data can be passed to child processes, i.e. images & such and not just environment strings. As I recall this was once proposed as a standard for inter-process communication and was at first tentatively endorsed by Atari and then dropped. Personaly, I think that this is a very practical solutin to this problem and some others. As I recall jruley on bix first proposed it but I may be wrong on this point.