Open Carefully -- Contents Under Pressure <greywolf@lonewolf.ithaca.com>  wrote:
 > The idea of having $status be an array of signed ints is not a bad idea.
 > It would probably require that an agreement be reached on how to pass
 > exit status and signal status back to the calling process.  I would

Gee, have you been sleeping near Apollo's recently?  

This is the sort of thing that Apollo did and faults generated status
codes that were numeric in nature... It was sort of like errno on
steroids.. There was then a database file of error messages that you
could reference with a small userland application to decode the 
error (occasionally, the utilities that caused the error would
decode for you)...

For example:

[4]$ stcode 80001
disk not ready (OS/disk manager)
[8]$ stcode 40004
reference to illegal address (OS/MST manager)

...and my personal favourite:

[9]$ stcode 220009
unit will not fit thru 25" hatch (OS/magtape manager)

(amusing story behind that one btw....)

Anyways, now that we're *completely* off topic.....