[M3devel] FW: more path stuff, sorry

[Tony Hosking]

Jay, there is an underlying principle here that you seem to be missing  
so I will make it explicit.  Cross-product systems tend to acquire  
unmanageable complexity, especially when it comes to testing.  By  
making each target one personality we are able to test machine- 
dependent code in isolation from machine-independent code.  Often,  
when something breaks on one target I will test on another just to  
isolate the problem.  This is a very powerful approach and I am very  
leery of destroying any ability to do this -- it allows us to maintain  
the high-level portability of most Modula-3 code while isolating the  
small fraction of machine-/target-dependent stuff.



On Apr 22, 2008, at 12:28 AM, Jay wrote:

> [truncated]...
>
>
>
>
> From: jayk123 at hotmail.com
> To: rcoleburn at scires.com; m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: RE: [M3devel] more path stuff, sorry
> Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:19:52 +0000
>
> There's no dependency, no linkage. Just a few simple string  
> operations.
> I'll probably remove it tonight.
>
> Modula-3 has a split personality no matter what, in that it calls  
> into very varying underlying layers, often trafficing in their  
> specific data formats.
> It's just that it can strive to aid portability between them or not,  
> by accepting either input and massaging it to work, vs. passing it  
> along "unchanged" (well, that's not what happens actually). If there  
> were no ambiguous cases and the Posix systems on Windows were  
> consistent in their conventions, I'd be more for it. But the  
> ambiguity and varying Posix conventions weaken the case tremendously.
>
>  - Jay
>
> Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:14:00 -0400
> From: rcoleburn at scires.com
> To: m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: Re: [M3devel] more path stuff, sorry
>
> I concur wholeheartedly.  I absolutely DO NOT want native NT386 to  
> have any knowledge of or dependency on Cygwin.
> Regards,
> Randy
>
> >>> Tony Hosking <hosking at cs.purdue.edu> 4/21/2008 9:44 PM >>>
> Why would native NT386 know anything at all about Cygwin.  I say  
> just avoid split personalities like the plague.  Similarly, I'd be  
> happy for NT386GNU (i.e., Cygwin?) to simply behave like a POSIX  
> build (modulo native threads perhaps).
>
> On Apr 21, 2008, at 7:15 PM, Jay wrote:
>
> Maybe this is dubious.
>
> The question is, like, should native NT386 cm3 accept /cygdrive/c/ 
> foo and translate to c:\foo?
> Or trickier, /usr/bin/foo and translate to c:\cygwin\usr\bin\foo?
> And vice versa, should NT386GNU accept c:\foo?
>
> ...

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