Argh, second word of second paragraph is “answer’s”, an attempted pluralization of “answer”?
Argh!
Will continue reading anyway, and will lose karma for this, but shit, does no one even read their shit after publishing anymore?
Why is the DOS path character "\"?
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#52Relevant to this, one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written: http://alanhogan.com/tips/php/directory-separator-not-necess...
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#53What bugs me is that they chose a character right next to "Return" on the keyboard. For some reason no PC keyboard has moved it. I've had embarrassing MS-DOS moments in the past where I was typing out something like a recursive-delete on a path. If you accidentally hit RETURN instead of a backslash then you can do things like blow away entire parent directories unintentionally. This didn't exactly improve my already-…
are you saying they looked into the future and chose a character next to return on a keyboard that hadn't been designed yet? http://www.pcguide.com/ref/kb/layout/stdXT83-c.html
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Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're referring to \ it's a backslash not a forward slash.
A simple way to remember forward/backslash (which I probably read on HN) is the phrase "Backslash is by the backspace" Edit: This is for the standard US keyboard. A more general way of thinking about it, though a bit more to remember: associate "positive" with "forward", and see that '/' has a positive slope. Or just go listen to a BBC podcast, and let the sound of the broadcaster saying "bbc dot co dot uk forward-sl…
I think of them as pipes that are falling over. The backslash falls backward and the forward slash falls forward.
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're referring to \ it's a backslash not a forward slash.
A simple way to remember forward/backslash (which I probably read on HN) is the phrase "Backslash is by the backspace" Edit: This is for the standard US keyboard. A more general way of thinking about it, though a bit more to remember: associate "positive" with "forward", and see that '/' has a positive slope. Or just go listen to a BBC podcast, and let the sound of the broadcaster saying "bbc dot co dot uk forward-sl…
"Forward slash" is a goofy name anyway. There are:
- "slash": the character you use in English and when typing fractions; and
- "backslash": the Microsoft-slash: backwards, like everything else they do.
Another way to remember is that (at least on US keyboards) the slash is always in the same place (on the same key as the question mark). The backslash, being the oddity that it is, is in different places, depending on the keyboard vendor.
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other people use '.' in dates. Or '-'. Especially the latter would end up with the same problem: Why is - and -- used as a switch character if it is used in dates (and even quite common in normal text, names)? And given that the history of '\' as a path separator is that long, maybe you haven't seen in elsewhere _because_ it is now forever taken for the world's most popular OS?
Why is - and -- used as a switch character if it is used in dates (and even quite common in normal text, names) Those uses rarely have it next to whitespace, and almost never immediately after whitespace. If someone’s named Jean-Claude, it is not customary to refer to them as -Claude for short, and if I refer to items dated 2012-03-19 and 2012-03-20, it is not customary to call one of them -20. But that last example…
Well responded.
Two (not entirely serious) counterarguments:
- Lists like this
- Abusing the char as em-dash
- Weird languages. In German it's quite common to use that character to shorten the monster words. Pulling samples from my reared (note the disclaimer about being not to serious)
Lebens- und Krankenversicherung
(Shorthand for Lebensversicherung und Krankenversicherung)
Arbeitsplatz und -Umfeld
(Arbeitsplatz und Arbeitsumfeld?)
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#57What bugs me is that they chose a character right next to "Return" on the keyboard. For some reason no PC keyboard has moved it. I've had embarrassing MS-DOS moments in the past where I was typing out something like a recursive-delete on a path. If you accidentally hit RETURN instead of a backslash then you can do things like blow away entire parent directories unintentionally. This didn't exactly improve my already-…
It's funny to think of how standardized keyboards are within the US today, and yet it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't even count on the arrow keys being in the same place (or in fact, being there at all - which is why you have hjkl on Vim to this day. On the other hand, the computers at Bell Labs had an arrow key, which is why R (which is based on S) uses ' And on a related note, I can't imagine how people use V…
As a frequent vim user I probably should have done the caps-as-esc remap but by now caps-as-control is so engrained in my muscle memory that I now have a significant friction to changing it.
My favorite keyboard happens to be the Apple Extended Keyboard II, but I can't use one these days because its caps key would physically toggle between on and off states (like a typewriter caps key) which means it does not make a very good candidate for remapping.
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good thing though since this encourages more people to use the ISO date formats. They are unambiguous, easy to parse and sort correctly
There are other uses of the slash character. It's a poor choice. _ or | get my vote, but it's a bit late now to fix the mistakes of the past. There are enough special chars needed anyway that collisions are inevitable. At least they didn't pick 'E'.
The problem with those characters is that they require you to hold shift to type them on a standard keyboard. Also, they make you reach in a way that / doesn't (now I'm showing my pro-/ bias).
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#59Interestingly, if you ever come to Japan you will find many people expect path separators to be yen symbols (¥). Their windows paths look like: ¥docs¥finance¥ To understand the reason, just check out the table on the Shift-JIS encoding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS Specifically, look at the character at 0x5C where the backslash sits in ASCII. Learning this was one of those mind-blowing moments when you try…
That was one of my awkward debugging moments. We had a path issue for a Japanese clients and I was completely unaware of this specificity. The path issue was somewhere else but understanding that having ¥ instead of \ was a feature and not a bug took me a while.
Re: Why is the DOS path character "\"?
#60What bugs me is that they chose a character right next to "Return" on the keyboard. For some reason no PC keyboard has moved it. I've had embarrassing MS-DOS moments in the past where I was typing out something like a recursive-delete on a path. If you accidentally hit RETURN instead of a backslash then you can do things like blow away entire parent directories unintentionally. This didn't exactly improve my already-…
It's funny to think of how standardized keyboards are within the US today, and yet it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't even count on the arrow keys being in the same place (or in fact, being there at all - which is why you have hjkl on Vim to this day. On the other hand, the computers at Bell Labs had an arrow key, which is why R (which is based on S) uses ' And on a related note, I can't imagine how people use V…
Ctrl-[, which turns out to be ESC, is one solution. Given that many people like to remap CapsLock to Ctrl, it might give you the best of both worlds.