Beryllium Sphere(tm)'s Journal: Best of Slashdot

DEVELOPER RANT - Version checking. (Score:5, Interesting)
by argent (18001) Neutral on Thursday April 28, @04:27AM (#12369887)
( http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ )

DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51).

DEVELOP RANT: don't use OS version tests if you can use feature tests instead.

Not a comment specifically directed at you, I don't know if you do this, but I keep running into software on all platforms that doesn't run on older versions even when patches, service packs, hotfixes, software updates, backported libraries, or compatibility fixes have removed the dependency on the specific OS version they hardcoded into the application.

One of the nice things about the Amiga is that all the developer documentation showed code checking library versions instead. Not perfect, but much better than OS version checks. Palm provided hooks to do functional checks down to the entry point level, but then spoiled it by shipping example code doing OS version checking.