[MACTCL] Re: tcl_platofrm & MacOSX

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

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In article <3b9f5eb9$0$42882$8e9...@ne...>, Ryan Casey
<sc...@ho...> wrote:

> Below I have included the tcl_platforms that I am currently programming to.
> (Actually, Linux too, but I don't have a test machine to get the info.)  My
> concern is with MacOS X.  Is the platform=unix, os=Darwin canonical.  IOW,
> can I be sure this is how Tcl is always going to report it? 

yes that's pretty much guaranteed, as tcl on unices simply reports the
result of uname() in tcl_platform(os) and that's VERY unlikely to
change on OS X as a lot of things depend on this being 'Darwin'.

> It makes my
> platform-specific switching structures a little more complex and
> unintuitive, considering I load Mac stuff two places (first if
> platform=macintosh, then if platform=unix, os=Darwin).

but that's a good thing, i.e. for a lot of code, tcl on darwin should
not appear different from other unices, e.g. TclX works just fine
essentially unchanged (minor changes required...)
OTOH, if os==Darwin, you can assume that a lot of things that work on
platform == macintosh will work as well, e.g. Tclapplescript (not just
yet...), TclAE (done), hopefully the 'resource' command and other mac
specific commands (beep) in the near future, as well as other
carbonizable extensions (QuickTimeTcl comes to mind, maybe Snack?)

so if you need to know, you can find out if you're running under OSX
but most code running on other unices will not need/want to know and
will still run just fine.

in most cases you may actually want to be careful about assuming that
os==Darwin is equivalent to platform==macintosh, esp. if you make
assumptions about macintosh specific behaviour, for instance w.r.t
paths (path separator is '/' not ':', no volumes etc)

Things may change a bit on Tk, considering there will be two
possibilities for Tk, Tk on Xwindows and TkAqua... not sure how this
will be handled/reported yet; Jim?

Cheers

Daniel