Version Identifiers for Platforms / Architectures not supported by DMD

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, November 05, 2011 20:48:32 Iain Buclaw wrote:
> I have had a recent pull request regarding the updating of some of GDC's OS
> and Arch version identifiers.
> 
> https://bitbucket.org/goshawk/gdc/pull-request/2/make-some-system-and-cpu-ve
> rsion
> 
> Such changes include, aix -> AIX; ALPHA -> Alpha;  and a few more.
> 
> 
> While I welcome any change suggestions, I would love to hear the opinion of
> D users on the proposed change.

dmd's version identifiers are annoyingly variable (e.g. linux is camelcased, 
whereas Windows is Pascal-cased and OSX is all uppercase). Most of them, 
however, are Pascal-cased, so for consistency, it's probably better to make 
them all Pascal-cased, but given the lack of consistency and the fact that you 
don't necessarily get any errors when you use an incorrectly-spelled version 
identifier, you generally have to look it up regardless, and if you always have 
to look it up, the exact casing doesn't necessarily matter.

Still, I'd argue that version identifiers in general should just be Pascal-
cased since that seems to be the most common casing used, and ideally, they'd 
be consistent.

For acronyms, that would mean all uppercase, so assuming that AIX is an 
acronym, then AIX would be the correct way to go, and assuming that alpha 
isn't an acronym, then Alpha would be the correct way to go (I'm not 
particularly familiar with non-x86 architectures, so I don't know whether 
they're acronyms or not - though I'd guess that AIX is and Alpha isn't).

- Jonathan M Davis