wait(2)

[Mike Gunter]

Scsh (Scheme Shell) has a mechanism to turn the Unix process interface
into something reasonable.  Instead of PIDs, fork returns process
objects.  The SIGCHLD signal handler reaps processes and their exit
status.  The program can retrieve the exit status using the process
object.  If the process object is GCed, the status can be as well.
This seems be right for almost all code (and reaping policy can be
changed for the remaining code.)

The details of Scsh's mechanism can be found in the manual

   ftp://ftp-swiss.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-manual.ps

on pages 55-58.

        mike