MacMiNT/VTOS: system variables

[Julian Reschke <reschke@ESCHER.UNI-MUENSTER.DE>]

I've invested a small amount of time for looking into the MacMiNT stuff
(version 1.12 still not running on my PB).

It seems that MacMiNT only supports a very limited amount of system
variables (that is: p_cookies). It seems that it needs either
(a) a method to tell applications to ignore all system variables, or
(b) it should emulate them and move them to a different place, publishing
their offset from 0x000000L by a system call. As far as I remember, VTOS
has similar problems (where was the source?).

So a possible approach would be a system call which maps a pointer to
a system variable to a different place. Applications (and libraries!)
would then do things like:

p_cookies = Svarmap (0x5a0);
if (p_cookies == EINVFN) p_cookies = 0x5a0;

Comments anyone?

(This would be a no-brainer, as Allan Pratt used to see. Obviously, we
could also define a more elegant way to access system variables, but this
should be easy enough to add into applications and the kernel).

-- 
---------------------------------------------------
Julian F. Reschke, Hensenstr. 142, D-48161 Muenster
 eMail: reschke@math.uni-muenster.de jr@ms.maus.de
___________________________________________________