On Sun, Jan 28, 2001 at 08:56:33PM -0500, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 28, 2001 at 10:07:55PM +0100, Bart Lateur wrote:
> > Uhm, I'm sorry, but that's not good enough. You cannot distinguish
> > between Windows 95/98/ME on one side, and NT/2k on the other, using $^O
> > alone. After all, $^O is just a constant burnt into the executable when
> > perl was compiled. You can run the same perl.exe on all platforms, and
> > indeed, most people do. Yet win9* and NT are different enough in
> > behaviour (e.g. flock) to warrant a test on platform. Er... which is: no
> > go.
>
> Well, fork works on both now, but I see your point. There are ways of
> detecting the OS at run-time under Windows, mostly through MFC junk or
> peeking in the registry. It would probably be good to do it for the
> MacOS versions, too.
The desire to know the name of the runtime platform is a misdirected desire.
What you really want to know is whether function Foo will be there, what
kind of signature it has, whether file Bar will be there, what kind of
format it has, and so on, whether a feature Zog is present, or what
is the value of parameter Blah. Just knowing the name of the platform
doesn't buy you a whole lot.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
