Problem with a tuple - newbie ignorance

[Grant Edwards]

In article <943vu402jit at news2.newsguy.com>, Alex Martelli wrote:
>"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
[...]
>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, 

That's my recollection: the DOS file I/O services accepted
forward slashes.

>while the Win32 APIs are not so forgiving).

That I didn't know.

>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:-).

Well, the only way they could convince people to use the awful
GUI that windows used to have (it's improved somewhat), was to
make sure the command-line shell was completely useless.  I
suppose it's kept MKS in business.

-- 
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