Gerhard Fiedler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... a few fine points of computing history...:
> >> (URLs probably use the slash because the internet protocols have been > >> developed largely on Unix-type systems for use with Unix-type systems?) > > > > It wasn't designed specifically for Unix-type systems, but for universal > > access. > > Right... the URI/URL syntax was formalized in the early 90ies, when The internet *protocols* were typically developed on non-Unix systems -- that's why each line in text-based protocols must be terminated by \r+\n, not just \n. The WWW, as you mention, came later (and I believe it was born on a NEXT cube, i.e., a unix-variant). > > My point also was that a lot of programming languages use the backslash > > as escape character. This has been true at least since the sixties. I > > think it's a bad design choice from the Microsoft team to pick this > > escape character as a path separator. > > Maybe... have you been involved in the decision? Or do you know what the > reasons were? Do you know whether it was even Microsoft's choice? > (Remember, they wrote DOS for IBM. And there was nobody who had foreseen > the PC explosion.) Microsoft did *NOT* write DOS -- they purchased it from a small Seattle company, which called it QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS) and had hacked it up "in desperation" because CP/M did not run on intel 8086 CPUs, so the small company's main business, selling 8086 boards, languished. QDOS was as compatible with CP/M as said small company could make it (rumor has it that big parts were disassembled from CP/M and reassembled to run on 8086 rather than 8080). Part of the CP/M compatibility did include the use of / as flag-indicator (the use of \r+\n as line ending also comes from CP/M -- in turn, CP/M had aped these traits from some DEC minicomputer operating systems). When MS did write an OS -- DOS 2.0, which introduced a directory tree -- they did put in the OS an undocumented switch to make - the flag-indicator and / the path separator, rather than / and \ respectively. However it was never documented and it got removed in later versions, perhaps because applications coded to the /-and-\ convention could break if the switch was thrown. > Did you know that most DOS versions accept the / as path separator? That > DOS was written on Xenix (Posix) systems (using the slash as path > separator)? That Microsoft was for a long time pretty much a pure Xenix > shop? Internally yes (indeed, they developed Xenix, before later selling it to SCO), but that does not mean that "DOS was written on Xenix" because DOS was *not* written in Microsoft, as above mentioned. Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
