Thomas Schilling wrote:
On 6 aug 2007, at 12.26, Neil Mitchell wrote:
.... = os == "mingw"
This is wrong on so many levels!
I agree, but
Proposal:
Add System.Info.isWindows :: Bool
is hardly better, because this opens the door to political issues (why not have isLinux, isFreeBSD, isNetBSD, ...?) And I'm not even sure returning True for every Windows incarnation is the right thing in most use cases. In general you want to test for APIs--not the OS per se.
Like it or not, Windows is a very significant, special case, where programs often transform themselves, more than they need to, based on a simple judgment of whether they're on "windows" or not, even when POSIX APIs are available, etc., etc. ***I don't like it either.*** But defining APIs is hard work, Windows is in practice much different from almost anything else, much more important, and many of us aren't interested in expending too much hard work to support (flexibly, in detail,) stupid closed-source platforms. Developers tend to want to check for isWindows anyway: they already do, with os=="mingw" and other hacks. ***I think isWindows is necessary, at least as a intermediate solution***... if someone makes more, API-specific queries sometime, then it will be easier to search existing code for the unified "isWindows" and find everywhere that might be improved. I vote *against* the name isMicrosoftWindows because the query *should* return True in ReactOS / Wine, assuming Haskell and them can be made to work at all! Any differences there, should be resolved by more detailed queries (e.g. Window OS version number! - or whatever they use for labelling their versions) Isaac