Xah Lee's Unixism

[Charlie Gibbs]

In article <Yb6Zc.32434$Es2.12983421 at news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net>,
jwkenne at attglobal.net (John W. Kennedy) writes:

>Craig A. Finseth wrote:
>
>> Wrong.  The / was chosen as the command line option separator
>> because whoever wrote MSDOS was looking to CP/M, who modelled
>> their commands after a PDP-11 operating system (RT-11?).  Consider
>> the "PIP" command.

At least PIP would copy zero-length files.

>> When they went to MS/DOS 2.0 and needed path separators, they
>> found that "/" was already taken, so they used "\".  But there
>> was a hidden way to tell the command interpreter that it could
>> use "-" for options.
>
>Except, of course, that it was useless, because 99% of programs did
>their own option parsing, and still do.  The hidden option only lasted
>one .1 subrelease, as I recall.

Yes, my programs indeed do their own parsing.  And they insist on
"-", no matter which OS they're running on.  :-)

>> And in all systems starting with 2.0, the system calls have taken "/"
>> and "\" interchangably.
>
>...which is /one/ thing that the FLOSS community can honestly thank them
>for.

Now, do you trust Microsoft to keep it that way?  I don't.  That's why
my programs are full of things like:

#ifdef DOSWIN
    strcat (filespec, "\\");
#else
    strcat (filespec, "/");
#endif

Yes, it's bulky and ugly.  But it's also future-proof.

--
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