Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
by GordonS on Sunday May 26, 2019 @05:23AM
(#20013977)
> A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic
Windows allows you to enclose paths in double quotes, which deals with the space problem.
Off the top of my head, I don't recall if Linux has the same behaviour?
TOPS-10 subdirectory separators were commas, but the path was enclosed in [] so it was always clear which part was a path and which part was something else.
UNIX and DOS/Windows made a big mistake by removing the enclosing characters, and TOPS-10 was a 6.3 file system that never used them to their full extent.
The (back) slashes and switches weren't the biggest problem. Spaces in file paths were - and sometimes still are - hard to deal with.
A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic, and would also have allowed almost all other characters to be used without problems.