[Distutils] Finishing PEP 345

[Rafael Villar Burke (Pachi)]

On 11/01/2010 6:13, David Lyon wrote:
> My presumption as a long standing windows programmer is that somehow the
> 'i386' notation was somehow meant to be somehow related to windows. Since
> in the past, windows users had intel processors and mac users had risc
> (motorola) processors.
>
> So.... 'i386' can mean Linux, Mac, or Windows.
>    
Windows (NT) used to run also on IA-32, MIPS and PowerPC processors too, 
and Windows (CE) also runs on other CPU FAMILIES other than i386 (ARM, 
MIPS, Hitachi SuperH).

So, no, i386 is just a widely used name to call the subset of the x86 
family that runs on 32bit (vs. the old 16bit members of the family, 
x86_64, etc). Significant compilers adopt this or a similar convention.

Regards,

Rafael Villar Burke