On Mon, 2016-03-28 at 10:24 -0400, Thompson, David wrote: > The environment variable path separator is *not* defined depending on > the OS. It is up to the programs that interpret these search paths > to specify what the separator should be. ":" is the most common > separator, but that is just convention. A search path is opaque to > the operating system, where environment variables are just strings > with no inherent meaning.
I think this is too simple an answer. In fact, the operating system DOES parse the PATH variable (for example on UNIX systems to implement some of the exec() family of functions). And on Windows, using ";" as a separator is a requirement of the operating system as well.
