Comment on dotnet developer
Octopus1348@lemy.lol 9 months agoI once heard some YouTuber say Windows uses \ in path names instead of / like everyone else because Microsoft thinks backwards.
Comment on dotnet developer
Octopus1348@lemy.lol 9 months agoI once heard some YouTuber say Windows uses \ in path names instead of / like everyone else because Microsoft thinks backwards.
dan@upvote.au 9 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 thatDIRcommand have a/Woption, or is it viewing the contents of theWdirectory 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 > LPT1to send a document to a printer, so the device names are reserved globally (so they can work regardless of what folder you’re in).