Windows vs. Linux

[Gerhard Fiedler]

On 2006-08-01 16:29:54, Sybren Stuvel wrote:

>> - Mac OS: ':'
> 
> It's a slash too, at least on non-obsolete Mac OS versions.

I wrote "Mac OS". That's not "Mac OSX". Ask Apple... :)  And Mac OSX is
quite arguably a Unix-type system.

>> Maybe someone else can fill in some of the missing OSes. It doesn't
>> seem to look like Windows is the odd man out; it rather seems that
>> every type of OS uses its own separator.
> 
> You can put a whole lot of OSses under "Unix-type", but actually it's
> more like this:

Well, you could list a number of DOS versions, too. Doesn't help the fact
that the slash is mainly on Unix-type systems, and that there are or were
quite a number of other systems out there that use other separator
characters. 

>> (URLs probably use the slash because the internet protocols have been
>> developed largely on Unix-type systems for use with Unix-type systems?)
> 
> It wasn't designed specifically for Unix-type systems, but for universal
> access.

Right... the URI/URL syntax was formalized in the early 90ies, when
Unix-type machines were dominant on the internet. There are also quite a
number of concerns that governed the choice of separators and escape
characters for URLs that the IBM, Microsoft and DEC/VMS people couldn't
really foresee in the 70ies (for example, when DEC and IBM started to use
the slash as command line switch character -- which later precluded its use
as path separator). 

> My point also was that a lot of programming languages use the backslash
> as escape character. This has been true at least since the sixties. I
> think it's a bad design choice from the Microsoft team to pick this
> escape character as a path separator. 

Maybe... have you been involved in the decision? Or do you know what the
reasons were? Do you know whether it was even Microsoft's choice?
(Remember, they wrote DOS for IBM. And there was nobody who had foreseen
the PC explosion.) 

Did you know that most DOS versions accept the / as path separator? That
DOS was written on Xenix (Posix) systems (using the slash as path
separator)? That Microsoft was for a long time pretty much a pure Xenix
shop?

> The problem with the world is stupidity. 

Right... And most people are /really/ smart 30 years after the fact; "I
would have known it better" is about as smart as it gets :)

Gerhard