Re: environment variables

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Have you been following the austin-group discussion about the behavior
> of assignments prefixing builtin vs. external commands?

Only very vaguely.  It was about some fairly abstruse behaviour that's
not yet standardised, so I didn't particularly sit up and take notice,
but I've forgotten the details.
 
> } I think we can just copy the parameter instead of removing it, so long
> } as we copy it properly.
> 
> What did the name "toplevel" signify before?  Obviously it's semantically
> the same as "fakecopy", but it must have meant something to someone ...

It was named because of the use it was put to rather than the function
it had (poor interface design on my part).  It refers to the top level
of parameter handling when paramtab is the "real" parameter table, as
opposed to when it's the parameter table contained within an associative
array (when we're somewhere within the bowels of parameter code).  In
the former case it happened we never needed to do a real copy because we
only used it for partially saving special parameters (but now we use it
for normal parameters at the same "level", which wasn't even a
particularly descriptive word).

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/