[Doc-SIG] why no macros for DOS/Windows and MacOS?

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Anthony Baxter writes:
 > We have a standard macro for Posix, for Unix, but none for DOS/Windows or
 > for MacOS. Is this deliberate? Should it be added?

Anthony,

The POSIX and Unix macros are quite old (along with the ASCII macro),
being added before I wrested maintenace of the docs from our BDFL.
Various discussions with him lead me to believe that he's not overly
fond of them, and would rather they not exist.  I don't really agree
with him on this point, and have resisted removing them, but it's more
of a vague feeling that they're reasonable.

On the other hand, of course, *adding* new macros for simple
substitutions that seem unlikely to ever change is a hard case to
make, especially given that so many new document fragments that get
added don't initially have these marked.

The typical use case in technical documentation for this kind of
markup is product names; you can define a name to mean "this product",
and then rename the product independently (somewhat) of the using the
references by changing the macro definition.  So, it's not a macro for
Windows or Mac OS that should be defined, but for \Python.  Just try
and get that past \Guido.  ;-)

Conceivably, we could define macros for Windows and Mac OS for
consistency (\Guido{} wouldn't be happy), and at least for Mac OS we
could say it's for consistent treatment of the embedded space.  But
this is at least somewhat contrived.  I'd be happier if we had a
concrete requirement to "hook into" references, whether for
typesetting (as we do for \UNIX), indexing (unlikely to be helpful),
or for some other purpose.

What did you have in mind?


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation