2.13 Global Variables and Utility functions

Different vendors are not consistent about how they treat global and static variables. Most vendors write C compilers in which global variables are shared among all the processors in the node. A few vendors write C compilers where each processor has its own copy of the global variables. In theory, it would also be possible to design the compiler so that each thread has its own copy of the global variables.

The lack of consistency across vendors, makes it very hard to write a portable program. The fact that most vendors make the globals shared is inconvenient as well, usually, you don't want your globals to be shared. For these reasons, we added ``pseudoglobals'' to CONVERSE. These act much like C global and static variables, except that you have explicit control over the degree of sharing.