The prim code could most certainly be rewritten to avoid use of a global flag but it is a big job that no one has felt able to tackle as yet. We even considered doing this at Interval, 10 years ago. Since we had four or five fulltime people that could have worked on it you can assume that we really did think it to be a large amount of work.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: MD: Move and Drop bits