How do you declare data (initialized or uninitialized) in a dll that will actually reside in the the calling program?

Data in dlls is relocated each run. It means there's no fixed pointer to such memory place. One solution I see is exporting a function which will return a pointer to the data.

i think he means how to export constant variable from '.data' section

I use FASM as a backend to my compiler. The compiler handles both console and graphic mode.

An example of what I was asking about might be a prestored CRLF string and its dope block.

Like Reverend says, the data is reloaded each time the pgm is run, so if the code in the dll tries to reference the CRLF dope block in the calling pgm, it wont know where it is (or if it even exists).

It looks like the best thing to do is create the prestored stuff in each dll so each dll has its own copy of all the common compiler vars.

Another one is STATUS which is a global var (dword) that stores the result of many functions (especially I/O) for reference by the compiler user to see if the operation was successful.

I hope this explains it better.