@notclacke @dalias @hipsterelectron Not quite. What I was referencing, which Cassandrich expanded upon, is the particular way in which this DOS behaviour was "ported" to Windows.
It's handled in the process environment, rather than at the OS level. Technically they are actual environment variables, so my "pseudo" was kinda misleading, but they use a mangled naming scheme to avoid collisions with other vars.
The link I posted in another reply goes into more detail (some of it in the comments).