On 11/01/2010 6:13, David Lyon wrote:
My presumption as a long standing windows programmer is that somehow the
'i386' notation was somehow meant to be somehow related to windows. Since
in the past, windows users had intel processors and mac users had risc
(motorola) processors.
So.... 'i386' can mean Linux, Mac, or Windows.
Windows (NT) used to run also on IA-32, MIPS and PowerPC processors too,
and Windows (CE) also runs on other CPU FAMILIES other than i386 (ARM,
MIPS, Hitachi SuperH).
So, no, i386 is just a widely used name to call the subset of the x86
family that runs on 32bit (vs. the old 16bit members of the family,
x86_64, etc). Significant compilers adopt this or a similar convention.
Regards,
Rafael Villar Burke
_______________________________________________
Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
