>> - many things which are runtime independent on unix are not on >> windows (file descriptor: AFAIK, a file descriptor as returned from >> open can be dealt with in any C runtime on unix) > > Are you telling me that file descriptors (it's a flippin int!) can't be > passed around universally on Windows??
There are really three things of concern here: a) operating system file handles, of type HANDLE (which is an unsigned 32-bit value); they are not contiguous, and stdin/stdout/stderr may have arbitrary numbers b) C runtime file handles, of type int. They are contiguous, and stdin/stdout/stderr are 0/1/2. c) C FILE*. OS handles can be passed around freely within a process; across processes, they lose their meaning It's the data of types b) and c) that cause problems: the CRT handle 4 means different things depending on what copy of the CRT is interpreting it. It's worse with FILE*: passing a FILE* of one CRT to the fread() implementation of a different CRT will cause a segfault. > And, as has already been said in this thread, this does not concern the > .net developer, or any developer that sticks to managed code, be it > .net, CPython, or something-else based. Since when is CPython managed code? Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
