JM>> Why go to all that trouble of maintaining all the ID's for the
 JM>> different tasks, date maintenance encoding etc when all that's
 JM>> really happening is the number is being incremented in some fashion?

 JdBP>  "Maintaining" task IDs isn't necessary, since the
operating system
 JdBP> does that for you.

it does?? since when does MS/PC/DR/4/etc-DOS do that?? i've never found any
reference to task id as far as these systems are concerned...

 JdBP> Most operating systems also provide a real-time
 JdBP> clock with a 1 second granularity.
                 ^
ermmm...    "at least"

)\/(ark