Patent ID: 7516061

Claim:
A method for enabling an emulator that emulates an e-mode program to utilize stored data items whose values are stored in native data format in native memory, the method comprising the emulator operations of: (a) fetching an item referenced by the e-mode program, the referenced item comprising a tag field and a data field; (b) determining whether the tag field of the referenced item indicates that the referenced item is an external reference word (ERW), the ERW being constructed by the emulator and placed on a stack as a parameter for the e-mode program at a point in time where the emulator determines that the e-mode program is going to be called by a native Dynamic Link Library with the corresponding stored data item as a parameter; and (c) if the tag field of the referenced item indicates that the referenced item is an ERW, decoding the ERW to obtain a data type and a pointer, the pointer corresponding to a location of a stored data item in native memory.