r wrote: > Steven, > Would you like to elaborate on -why- escaped backslashes are needed in > strings... i waiting???
Some character was needed. It just happens that backslashes have been used in this manner for composing nonprintable sequences, codes, etc. It's only in use because someone arbitrarily picked it about 40 years ago. Any character could have been used; any such character would still be have to escaped. Kind of funny that you are complaining about Python in particular when this behavior is in almost all languages today, including Perl, Ruby, Don't blame python for a mistake that Microsoft made, that of choosing a commonly-accepted escape character (long before Python was even though of!) as their path delimiter. Fortunately sane operating systems use a standard slash. Even Windows APIs accept forward slashes as path delimiters. So really your complaint about the backslash is a bit silly. Are you going to campaign that C# and Java also "fix" this problem by choosing another character? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list