In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Neil Cerutti wrote: > Keeping in mind which came first, isn't it at least as accurate > to attribute this problem to Python's choice of escape character?
No, it's Microsoft's fault. The use of backslash as an escape character goes back to Unix systems in the early 1970s--long before Microsoft came on the scene. When Microsoft introduced MS-DOS 1.0 in 1981, it didn't have directory hierarchies. Commands used the slash character to delimit options. Then when MS-DOS 2.0 introduced subdirectories in 1983, they decided they couldn't use the slash as the path separator, so they used the backslash instead. That has been a source of confusion ever since then. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
