When did Windows start accepting forward slash as a path separator?

[Andrew Dalke]

Stephen Feng:
> >> At one time, it was accepted as a truism that Windows (like MS-DOS)
> >> was different from Unix because Windows used the backslash as the path
> >> separator character, whereas Unix used the forward slash.

Me, arguing that the directory structure between DOS and its Windows
derivatives is a point of similarity, compared to the other differences.

Stephen Horne:
> Directly influenced, yes - but as DOS 1 didn't have subdirectories ...

Right.  I said that as well ...  Plus, Stephen's Feng's comparison
is predicated on comparing how directories are accessed, so it's
cheating to go back to when DOS didn't have directories.  ;)

> what is  accepted as an obvious truth is not always actually true,

A truer word has rarely been said.

BTW, the similarity-but-not-the-same between DOS and unix
caused me problems when I started using unix.  See, under DOS
there's this great utility called "unerase" which can be used to
recover files accidentally deleted.  Only I would deliberately
delete a file in order to probe the system; eg, is this file really
used?

And I wanted to see if the script really used the C compiler....

Had to reinstall IRIX to fix that one.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com