Setting the start-up state of a program

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As my agent-based modeling system develops, I am starting to hit the issue of how to uniformly and simply handle things like passing parameters into a program, reading initialization files, and saving program state.

I decided I had better read up on this and see how others have handled it. Searching brought up this article, but the writers seem like a couple of knuckleheads, and I am having a hard time understanding what they did

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