Re: Which way round are the slashes?
Using an Italian keyboard, Windows slashes are much more comfortable because they don't need to press Shift. Whoever coded Unix should have understood the World doesn't speak (and type) English only. Same is true for C....
I see / used in lots of places long before \ turned up. In fact, I recall typewriters that did not have a \ key. Quite often it was used to denote fractions. Wikipedia traces the (forward-)slash back to the 19th century. Amongst other things, it was also used to denote routes or paths, and so its use to denote a separator in a file path is sensible.
Backslash on the other hand, according to the same source was a 1960's invention.
So don't blame Unix for deficiencies in your beloved Italian keyboard or Microsoft's desire to do everything backwards.
They should use ñ as a path separator item because it's a simple keystroke on my keyboard. Period.
Hmm, how would that look? ñetcñfstab? C:ñWindowsñSystem32? No, not that good from a readability standpoint. ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
