Thank you, Tim.  Those are easy points to forget, usually at the worst 
possible juncture.  <g>

Gary


On Saturday 27 December 2003 13:33, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> Gary Fisher <gafisher at sprynet.com> wrote:
> > It's trivial perhaps, but very significant: Squeak is profoundly
> > cross-platform, the beauty of the Virtual Machine concept.  Your
> > application will neither know nor care whether it's running on a Mac, a
> > PC, or any of the many other Squeak platforms.
>
> Almost, but not quite completely true; there is at least one area where
> the platform can be felt fairly painfully - filenames.
>
> If your code embeds anything like a detail of a filename - say
> myFile:= FileStream oldFileNamed:'c:foo\bar\wibble.exe'
> then you are completely and utterly screwed if you try to run on a Mac.
> Never, never, wrote code like this. Well, unless it is intended to test
> some other code that is supposed to do something useful with the errors
> it will cause.
>
> For the directory separators use 'FileDirectory slash'. For sanity, try
> to live with your files in directories under the current  directory -
> what you get from 'FileDirectory default'. Yes, these are annoying
> problems and we keep bemoaning them but so far no accepted fix has
> arisen. Several decent ideas have been suggested but none of them are
> yet in the sytem.
>
> Oh, and platform specific things like Word and Excel files won't be of
> enormous use unless you are intending to use some FFI calls to spawn
> the appropriate application with them.
>
>
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Do you like me for my brain or my baud?