On 2009-04-14 17:56:51 -0400, Walter Bright <[email protected]> said:
Jacob Carlborg wrote:
If you follow what's normally written in the official literature and
documentation shouldn't it be "MacOSX" then?
Perhaps. One could argue it either way. I checked the predefined
identifiers in gcc for guidance, and found just the unfortunately
generic __APPLE__. I wish Apple would make up their mind what they
wanted to call their OS.
To me it's clear that Darwin is the core on which Mac OS X and iPhone
OS are based on. Mac OS X looks like a marketing name to me; I wouldn't
be surprised if in a few years it gets renamed to Mac OS XI, or
something else, because Mac OS X 10.10 would sound bad, just as would
Mac OS X 11. Perhaps we'll see Mac OS 11, iOS or something; whatever
the change, the "X" part will have to move out at some point.
I believe Darwin is a more stable identifier for the architecture than
Mac OS X. But I also agree with Walter that it's probably not something
a newbie to programming and/or the platform would expect. In the end, I
think I'd choose Darwin because you want the identifier to represent
the OS architecture, not all the higher-level features Apple has
layered on top of it, and because most people interested in writing
cross-patform code using Darwin/OSX-specific features will already know
about Darwin.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
