Re: [Jim Meyering] Re: [Bug-gnulib] strftime merge from Emacs

[Jim Meyering]

"Eli Zaretskii" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
>> Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 08:31:53 +0200
>>
>> Is there some symbol other than _WIN32 and __WIN32__ that is
>> consistently defined by compilers on those systems?
>
> No, not to my knowledge.  These conditionals cover both MinGW and MSVC
> compilers (the former is a port of GCC and is free software, the
> latter is Microsoft's proprietary compiler), so something like _MSC
> (which is special to MSVC) or __GNUC__ alone could do.

Hi Eli,

Thanks for replying.
One approach to eliminating *WIN* symbols from most of the source code
would be to write an autoconf macro to test for the offending
symbols and if they're found, then define some more palatable form,
like WINDOWS32.

But that'd mean every program that uses one of the affected .c or .h
files would have to be sure to run the new corresponding autoconf macro.
That sounds pretty onerous -- and more-importantly, risky, since
it'd be easy to forget to use the then-required autoconf macro.