On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 8:45 PM, Mats Wichmann <m...@wichmann.us> wrote: > Yeah, fun. You need to escape the \ that the idiot MS-DOS people chose > for the file path separator. Because \ is treated as an escape character.
The COMMAND.COM shell inherited command-line switches (options) that use slash from TOPS-10 by way of CP/M, so using backslash in paths was less ambiguous for the shell (e.g. dir/w could be intended to run "w" in the "dir" subdirectory, or it could mean to run "dir" with the option "/w"). The DOS kernel did support both slash and backslash in file-system paths. Also, C wasn't a common language on the PC back then. BASIC was. Instead of using escapes in string literals, BASIC used addition at runtime with the CHR$ function or predefined constants. Support for hierarchical paths (DOS 2.0) came around at about the same time that C was rising in popularity, so the pain came on slowly like boiling a lobster. The system designers who really have no excuse are the NT kernel developers circa 1988-93. They were working in C on a system that already required converting paths from the DOS namespace to a native object namespace. They could have easily implemented the native object system to use slash instead of backslash. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
