Re: How to detect OS type and version?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Martin Dowie" <martin.dowie@baesystems.com> wrote in message
news:434f643e$1_1@glkas0286.greenlnk.net...
...
> Quick question for you Randy - was the original intent that "System.Name"
> provide this?

I think so. But it's an enumeration type, and adding values everytime a new
version of an OS becomes available is annoying, so there never was much
support for this.

Ada 83 compounded the problem by implying that users could simply use a
pragma System_Name to change the target. The net effect was that nobody
provided more than one target in the type System.Name.

For Janus/Ada, we used to provide a number of literals, but somewhere along
the line that got dropped, perhaps for the reason above. The name of the
literal is a bit helpful ("Win32" or "Unix"), but hardly portable in any
way.

                      Randy.