Re: gnutls for lose32

[Carsten Mattner]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 01/02/12 02:46, Carsten Mattner wrote:
>
>> "win32" is used in the same way as "posix" to refer to a set of
>> platform APIs.
>
> That's one name, but it's not the only one and it's not necessarily
> even the most common one in practice.  As discussed in
> <http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=10421#23>,
> Microsoft prefers the name "Windows API" to "Win32 API",

I have a hard time to decipher/interpret the following unambiguously:
"(Note that this was formerly called the Win32 API. The name
Windows API more accurately reflects its roots in 16-bit Windows
and its support on 64-bit Windows.)"

> and "Windows API" is quite commonly used.  Using this common
> name to talk about the API helps us to avoid the problem with "win".

It's the same imprecise definition as for posix.

> For Emacs's own identifiers, common practice is to use "w32_"
> as a prefix; perhaps that should be changed to something else
> at some point (when 64-bit Windows takes over?), but this should
> be an independent issue.  The proposed patch by and large
> leaves "w32" alone, since "w32" doesn't run afoul of the "win"
> issue.

I never understood what win64 is with the same code written
for "win32" compiled for x86_64 being a "win64" binary.
win32 was probably introduced during the Windows 95/Windows NT
move to differentiate 16-bit APIs. They shouldn't have introduced
a new name in the first place, but it's one of the companies which
strives to give stuff a new name and sell it as something brand new.
A preprocessor definition or compiler switch would have been
enough. This is probably what you get when marketing is involved
when naming internal technical stuff.