Comment on dotnet developer
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 11 months agoSay whatever you want about Microsoft, but they don’t mess around with backwards compatibility.
Comment on dotnet developer
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 11 months agoSay whatever you want about Microsoft, but they don’t mess around with backwards compatibility.
riodoro1@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s easy to be backwards compatible when you’re backwards in general.
Octopus1348@lemy.lol 11 months ago
I once heard some YouTuber say Windows uses \ in path names instead of / like everyone else because Microsoft thinks backwards.
dan@upvote.au 11 months ago
As what often happens, using
\
for paths is for backwards compatibility.Neither CP/M nor MS-DOS 1.0 had folders. When folders were added in MS-DOS 2.0, the syntax had to be backwards compatible. DOS already used forward slashes for command-line options (e.g.
DIR /W
) so using them for folders would have been ambiguous - does thatDIR
command have a/W
option, or is it viewing the contents of theW
directory at the root of the drive? Backslashes weren’t used for anything so they used them for folders.This is the same reason why you can’t create files with device names like
con
,lpt1
, and so on. DOS 2.0 has to retain backwards compatibility with 1.0 where you could do something likeTYPE foo.txt > LPT1
to send a document to a printer, so the device names are reserved globally (so they can work regardless of what folder you’re in).Honytawk@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Well, better to be backwards with backwards compatibility than to just be backwards.
looks at Apple