DOS/Windows and slashes (was Re: Windows XP Pro and PossiblefilePro Bug)

[Fairlight]

At Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 11:48:34AM -0500 or thereabouts, 
suspect John Esak was observed uttering:
> 
> What makes the flavor of "convention" you like any more important (or better
> design decisions) than those grown up around a DOS/Windows environment????
> When, in fact, those -h or -- ones in particular are so much "newer" than
> the /? which has been around since 1981 or 1982 as far as I can tell. For
> you to put down something that arose long before your preferred likes and
> dislikes as being something stupid to be rankled over... is a bit parochial.

I don't know why they didn't think to do something more sensible in the
first place.  CP/M had forward slash pathnames, didn't it?  And that dates
back to 1975.  Assuming my memory from my Turbo Pascal days (which required
CP/M on the Apple) isn't too rusty, and CP/M did have forward slashes, then
it makes little sense that MS should know about something that was a
precursor to their OS and then flip it about so strangely.  The only part
that gives it any sensible context is the history of how it came about, as
Bill put it forth yesterday.

> Something that millions of users have come to use in "their" environment,
> and you grouse about having to "do in Rome as the Romans do" because you are
> used to something which developed in "your" environment so many years
> later... well, c'mon, you have better things to grouse about, don't you?
> :-)

Mrm...yeah.  :)  And if not, I could always dig some up.  :)  

Sometimes it's just the result of the oddity that is my computing timeline.
I jumped straight from AppleDOS to BSD 4.3 Tahoe, and -then- backwards to
PC and MS DOS.  I know I worked on some TRS-DOS in there before *nix, but I
don't remember terribly much of it.  We spent most of our time in the BASIC
interpreter, as it was a high school class--which was really amusing as I
ended up helping teach part of it when we hit Pascal on the Apple IIcx, as
the teacher was still taking his course on Pascal while teaching it, and
I'd already known Pascal for three years.  :)

At any rate, my migration path is odder than most people's, who went from
the C64 or Apple right to PC first.  I more or less skipped that except for
applications work like word processing and spreadsheets, and jumped back to
the PC and MS DOS world after experiencing about four different flavours of 
*nix.

Still...the "when in Rome" thing only goes so far.  I've seen many DOS and
Windows applications that only have - style help that aren't even ports
from *nix.  There's nothing that says that a switch -must- start with a
forward slash--except MS's utilities.  People just want to broadly
extrapolate and generalise rather than learn individual applications.
COMMAND.COM doesn't actually care--it's the programs that care.  I can use
the old 16bit command shell with forward slash pathing with perl just fine,
for example.

I suppose I fall into the lot that would like to extrapolate and
generalise--but in the opposite direction, because a dash is generally
nothing special that you'd be stomping on compared to a slash.  It just
seems to make more inherent sense as a character to use, my experience
progression notwithstanding.

mark->
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