3 ms·
IBM objected in 1983 - yet that decision lives on today? It's what Windows displays to users, even if you can actually type in / and things still work. When Mi
by Alupis 3y ago
IBM objected in 1983 - yet that decision lives on today? It's what Windows displays to users, even if you can actually type in / and things still work.
When Microsoft wrote IIS and other web technologies the internal friction of path separators must have been fun to experience. "Why are we still using \ again, Jim? Oh, that's right, we chose poorly a decade ago and for some reason can't be bothered to fix it!"
> Dude, why are you so angry about what direction a slash goes?
Because it's rubbed my bum raw over the years and I've finally had enough! I mostly jest... but seriously, it's super annoying to deal with and a constant reminder of the poor decision making Microsoft products often encompass.
- foobarian 3y agoYou know what happens when you write a \ --> / converter? You get the python2 to python3 migration mess. Except with Windows it would have been millions of mom and pop shops left out in the lurch.
- Alupis 3y agoNo it wouldn't - because Microsoft did write a \ -> / converter and none of this bad stuff happened. Microsoft just chooses to still display \ to you in the UI... which is ridiculous and perpetuates \ living on in all user-facing places.
- foobarian 3y agoAre we arguing different things? I.e. removing support for \ altogether from anywhere in the OS vs. not showing it in UIs? I personally like the latter but it's a matter of taste I guess :-). It gives me warm and fuzzies to see C:\ D:\ etc. live on.
- asveikau 3y agoParsing a URI should not be a straight pass to open(2) [or CreateFile in Windows parlance] to get to the filesystem directly anyway ... Think of the security problems with that, or URIs where they don't actually correspond to filesystem objects. So, IIS already needs to parse the path distinctly. I'm going to say it didn't cause them a lot of trouble. Note also that Windows tends to use 16 bit Unicode everywhere, that's probably a bigger thing for IIS than the path separator.