dmd 1.043 alpha for FreeBSD 7.1

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-04-14 17:56:51 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> 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
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/