On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 01:38:58PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> Currently, I don't want to promise back before Win98, though if Win95 is no
> different from a programming standpoint (I have no idea if it is) then
> that's fine too. Win 3.1 and DOS are *not* target platforms, though if
> someone gets it going I'm fine with it.
I'd tend to say that we should support back to win95 (original, not sp2).
AFAIK, there's nothing that changed that should effect core perl/parrot.
The one big exception is Unicode support, NT-based systems have much better
Unicode. Specificly, you can output unicode to the console. However, only
targeting NT machines is absolutly not-an-option, for obvious reasons.
It might be that we end up with an NT binary with support for printing
Unicode to the console, and a generic binary without. (Come to think of it,
the only thing that should care is the opcode library that implements
print(s|sc).) There's a lot of other differences, of course, but for
everything the win95 versions should be sufficent. (For example, if we want
to set security properties on open, we need to use APIs that won't work on
95,98, or Me. But so long as we don't care, the security descriptor
parameter can be NULL, and it will work fine on both.)
I should note, BTW, that I don't write windows programs when I can manage
not to, and I don't run NT.
-=- James Mastros
