Problem with a tuple - newbie ignorance

[Alex Martelli]

"Keith F. Woeltje" <kwoeltje at mail.mcg.edu> wrote in message
news:3A64D9E8.B1D52E1E at mail.mcg.edu...
> Normal (forward) slashes won't however work in a command prompt window
> in Win2000.
> Does the python interpreter make the change "magically" (like it does
> the end of line marker)?

Not really -- it's actually the (Microsoft) runtime libraries
that _underlie_ the interpreter (and every other C or C++ program
that is compiled/linked with Microsoft Visual C++) that accept
forward slashes or backward ones indifferently in file-paths
(just as it's the same Microsoft runtime libraries that perform
any line end translation that may be needed).

But I've never seen any C or C++ compiler for Windows (or, earlier,
DOS) that would fail to provide this little convenience (I _think_,
but I'm not sure I recall correctly, that DOS would accept forward
slashes even at the system-call [interrupt] level, while the Win32
APIs are not so forgiving).

The command-line processors have long been the worst-crippled
parts of MS operating systems (which IS saying something, given
the crippledness level of other parts thereof:-).


Alex