A tale of two command arguments
A common issue I see in platform abstraction libraries is complete ignorance of fundamental incompatibilities between platforms. Let's look at an example case study: the arguments to the main function in C and C++. For starters, what text encoding do they use? Do you know off the top of your head? Better yet, where do they even come from? What is the purpose and source of the provided arguments? Do they come from a user? From the operating system? From a mix of the two? Do you really know what a locale is? Perhaps you think you know all these answers. There was once a time where I thought I did. Can you really be confident in your answers to these questions when you consider all platforms you hope to develop for? Consider this: on desktop operating systems, program arguments are often used for passing filesystem paths. The NTFS filesystem used by Windows stores file and directory names as arbitrary sequences of 16-bit numbers. Aside from a few banned numbers and sequences with sp