At the time (in MS-DOS 2.0) you could set SWITCHAR=- in CONFIG.SYS to override this setting. @kiwidrew's post above even has an excerpt from the source that dem

At the time (in MS-DOS 2.0) you could set SWITCHAR=- in CONFIG.SYS to override this setting. @kiwidrew's post above even has an excerpt from the source that demonstrates it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26272844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26272844 So in principle they could have thought of having something like PATHCHAR=/ as well.