Subject: Re: [clisp-list] Cygwin feature

From: "Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Apr 26 00:23:02 2002

Marco Antoniotti
> I strongly, strongly disagree.  It does not make sense.  The fact that
> something in the "a build" does not mean that it makes sense.
It's not just in the build. It's a sophisticated emulator.

Somebody once told me he once tried this out: On his Amiga, run the Atari Emulator. In the Atari emulator, run the Macintosch emulator. (Maybe in the Macintoch emulator, run the Commodore 64 emulator). It all worked.

Now suppose he'd be running MCL inside the Mac emulator. Do you expect the application to detect the Amiga? No, of course not.
All MCL sees is a Macintosh.

Back to cygwin. I believe there could be some misunderstanding about what cygwin is.
It's a sophisticated emulator.
It's not just a link library which e.g. provides UNIX-like read+write() C API for MS-DOS. If it were just that, the term "in the build" would apply.

IMHO, cygwin provides you with a lot of UNIX without the need to reboot from another partition. It's still an emulator. Applications therein expect UNIX/POSIX behaviour and semantics.

CYGWIN-CLISP doesn't even understand MS-DOS pathnames.

Could you image a programmer on some foreign Lisp system (ACL, LW, Corman) running on MS-Windows write an application with #+WIN32 in mind, whom CLISP people would have to tell
"#+WIN32 "C:\\foo\\bar" is not portable"?
"Because cygwin claims WIN32 but doesn't even understand native pathnames?"? That's a bad joke, isn't it?

:UNIX must be there for cygwin, :WIN32 must not.

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle