use-revolution Digest, Vol 79, Issue 28

[Vokey, John]

What do I do?  Rail against the fact that, sensibly, the engine translates all file references to one form, but fails to do so for many other utterly trivial differences.  So, one is always forced to check for the OS (see the dictionary for all the ridiculous exceptions).  Why?  Why doesn't the engine, as with file paths, choose one style?  It drives me nuts that in the IDE associated file references, for example, are different from that in the standalone, depending on the OS.  That is just maddening, and also one reason I rarely produce standalones: in the IDE *almost* all remains constant over OSs.  But create standalones and one spends way to much time compensating for silly differences over OSs that should not matter.

To make the point clear that is is not just RunRev that maintains this nonsense.  Take a look at this quintessential cross-platform app, R. You want to access text data in a rows by columns format on the clipboard by command in Mac OS X, you use: data.dat <- read.table(pipe("pbpaste"), header = TRUE), but on Windose, you use:
data.dat <- read.table(file("clipboard"), header = TRUE).  Why?  Why wouldn't something so primitive be coded in the engine?  Indeed, we all write a function in to handle the translation over systems, but, seriously, why should we have to?  Same in RunRev.  It it is a RunRev function or command, it should be identical over all systems.  Period.  If I see: ``how to do X on system y'' in RunRev, it should be followed by a single command for all systems.  I admit, it is often no more than a switch command and a 3-line wrapper, but, really, why should it be even that? RunRev has probably spent more time writing the damn dictionary explanation of the exception than it would take to just make the the switch and 3-lines of code inherent in the code.

On 2010-04-14, at 10:23 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Which brings up an interface question. My app lets users choose a folder 
> and then displays the folder path in a field. I've never bothered to 
> change it in the past, but now I'm wondering if I should translate all 
> the slashes to backslashes just for display on Windows, and then change 
> them back to regular slashes in the script when I need to work with the 
> path.
> 
> What do others do?

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