On 02/25/2013 09:08 PM, Michael Torrie wrote:
<snip> This is a reminder to me how much we Linux users look at Windows as a quaint anomaly with it's apparently backwards ways of doing things (like backslash directory separators, like CP/M did),
Actually the reason MSDOS used backslash was because it had already used the forward slash for a switch-character. Then for version 2, with hard disks being supported for the first time, they used the backslash instead. At the time I talked them into supporting a "switchchar" call to change to using the dash for switch character, and slash for subdirectories.
But the idea was never publicized, so it never caught on. And future versions of utilities generally paid no attention to the value of switchchar.
By the time Windows split off from MSDOS (NT 3.1), the support in the OS for both slash and backslash was well established. But the utilities never grew up.
Yes, using the slash as a switch-character was inherited from CP/M, through QDOS, then MSDOS.
On some of the old teletypes, if the data was coming in fast enough, you could see the first character of the next line printed before the typing element reached the left margin. So newline was then spelled CR/LF/NULL or even CR/LF/NULL/NULL
Buffering? What's that? -- DaveA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
