The little obstacles of interoperability

Deutsch

A lot of things in today’s IT landscape have been unified and interoperability is much better than 20 years ago.

Some examples:

• Networking: Today networking is TCP/IP. Even the physical cables with RJ45/Ethernet and the wireless networks have been standardized and all kinds of devices can use the same networks. In the old days there were tons of mutually incompatible proprietary network technologies like BitNet (IBM), NetBios (MS), DecNet (DEC), IPX (Novell),….
• Character Sets: Today we have Unicode and a few standard encodings. At least for Web and Emails we have ways to provide meta information about the actual encoding. This area is not totally free of problems, but on a very good way. In earlier days we had to deal with different EBCDIC-encodings or with character sets that only fully supported English langauge and a few languages using the same alphabet without additional letters like „ä“, „ö“, „ü“, „ø“, „ñ“,… So there we have encountered a great progress.
• Numbers: For floating point numbers and integers a relatively small set of standardized numerical types has been established, that are used more or less everywhere and behave almost in the same way. The issue of integer overflow remains problematic, though.
• Software: In the old days software was written for a specific machine, one CPU architecture and one OS. Today we have common platforms on different kind of hardware: Linux runs on almost any physical and virtual hardware from mobile phones and routers to super computers with practically the same kernel. Java, Ruby, Perl, Scala and some other programming languages are available on a range of platforms and provide some kind of abstract platform. And the web is often a good way to develop applications once for a large range of devices.
• File system: At least we now have a common understanding what a file system looks like. There are some OS specific specialties, but the general idea is still the same. It is possible to share file systems between different operating systems by using technologies like Samba.
• GNU-Tools: The GNU-Tools (bash, ls, cp, mv,……..) have become the standard on Linux boxes and they are way superior to the traditional Unix tools of the same role and name, that we can still find in Solaris, for example. You can (and should) install them on any Unix and even via cygwin on MS-Windows.

Interoperability is today for many of us interoperability between Linux (and possibly some other rare Posix/Unix-like systems) and Win32/Win64 (MS-Windows).

Experienced Linux users are used to having the forward slash („/“) as file path separator. The backslash is used for escaping special characters. In the MS-Windows-world we often see the backslash („\“) as file path separator. That is enforced in the CMD-window, because it does not pass through the forward slash. My experience with low level Win32/Win64 libraries shows that they understand both variants equally well. Anyway do Ruby, Perl, Java, Cygwin and others support the forward slash. So there is hardly ever any need to check the OS and use backslash or forward slash depending on that, other than for cmd/bat-scripts, but who wants them for more then five lines? I strongly recommend just using the forward slash also under MS-Windows when writing programs in Java, Perl, Scala, Ruby, … It makes life also easier, because the backslash often has to be doubled and it is sometimes hard to keep track of how many backslashes need to be written and to read it.

The line ending is a bit tricky. Linux and Unix use just a „Linefeed“ („\n“=Ctrl-J). For MS-DOS and MS-Windows the combination „Carriage-Return+Linefeed“ („\r\n“=Ctrl-M Ctrl-J) has become the default. Most of today’s programs do not care and understand both variants more or less equally well. Only Notepad does get confused with Linefeed-only files, but notepad is a bad choice anyway. Better Editors (gvim, emacs, ultraedit, scite, …) exist. On the other hand we get problems with the MS-Windows-line-termination in the case of executable scripts. Usually the contain a first line like „#/usr/bin/ruby“. The OS uses that as hint on how to execute them, in this case by calling /usr/bin/ruby. If the line ends with Ctrl-M Ctrl-J, then the OS tries to find a program „/usr/bin/ruby^M“ (^M = Ctrl-M = „\r“), which of course does not exist and we just get an obscure error message.

It is easy to do the conversion:

$ perl -i~ -p -e ’s/\r//g;‘ script

Or the other direction:

$ perl -i~ -p -e ’s/\n/\r\n/g;‘ textfile

For those who use subversion there are ways to enforce a certain way of line endings. Even git supports this.