wxPlatform class ?

[Olly Betts]

On 2006-07-06, Francesco Montorsi wrote:
>      wxOS_MAC,                    // Apple Mac OS 8/9/X with Mac paths
>      wxOS_MAC_DARWIN,             // Apple Mac OS X with Unix paths
>      wxOS_OS2_PM,                 // OS/2 Workplace
>      wxOS_WINDOWS,                // Windows or WfW
>      wxOS_MICROWINDOWS,           // MicroWindows
>      wxOS_PENWINDOWS,             // Windows for Pen Computing
>      wxOS_WINDOWS_NT,             // Windows NT
>      wxOS_WIN32S,                 // Windows 32S API
>      wxOS_WIN95,                  // Windows 95
>      wxOS_WINDOWS_CE,             // Windows CE (generic)
>      wxOS_WINDOWS_POCKETPC,       // Windows CE PocketPC
>      wxOS_WINDOWS_SMARTPHONE,     // Windows CE Smartphone
>      wxOS_WINDOWS_OS2,            // Native OS/2 PM
>      wxOS_PALMOS,                 // PalmOS
>      wxOS_DOS,                    // wxBase under MS-DOS
>      wxOS_UNIX,                   // Unix, Linux, FreeBSD
>      wxOS_BEOS,                   // BeOS
>      wxOS_MAX                     // the number of members of this enum

Why go to the trouble of distinguishing 10 different flavours of
Windows, yet lump a dozen or more different operating systems (some
much more different than Windows 95 vs Windows NT) under "Unix, Linux,
and FreeBSD"?

>      wxMGL,                    // MGL
>      wxX11,                    // Plain X11 and Universal widgets

For consistency the MGL comment should probably also note "and Universal
widgets".  I think you can also use wxUniversal on Windows, though I've
never tried.

> wxIsPlatform64Bit.

What will this mean though?  Has 64 bit pointers?  Has 64 longs?  Has 64
bit ints?  Or even is running on a 64bit processor (even if in 32 bit mode)?
Probably the most obvious definition is the addressable memory (which 
corresponds to "has 64 bit pointers") but I can think of reasons to care
more about other definitions.  Besides sizeof(void*)==8 is a more
precise and probably more optimisable way to write that if that's what
you actually want to test.

I think a more useful categorisation might be to describe the data size
model as one of LP64/ILP64/LLP64/ILP32/LP32 - a good summary is here:

http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/69.html (search the page for LP64).

Cheers,
    Olly