Irv Kalb wrote:
I started working in that environment in the days of Mac OS9. At that time, the Mac folder separator character was the ":" colon character.
Yes, in those days it was vitally necessary to use the os.path functions for cross-platform code. VMS is another example of a system which had wildly different pathname syntax. We're fortunate right now that the three major platforms have partially-compatible pathnames. Whether that will continue in the future is impossible to tell.
I didn't realize it but the character on a Mac is now the "/", same as the Unix character - probably changed when OS X came out.
Yes, MacOSX is essentially Unix in many ways.
I think either one will work on a Mac.
If mean either "/" or ":", no, that's not true -- ":" is just an ordinary filename character in MacOSX, same as Unix. But, if you create a filename containng ":", the Finder displays it as a "/" -- suggesting there's still something in there somewhere that works with Classic MacOS style pathnames!
When I started using Python, I thought it was very clever that I can use just the "/" character in Python, and Python seems to do whatever translation it needs to do to make the path work on the target system.
Which is an illusion caused by some degree of conversion in the major platforms. -- Greg
