Xah Lee's Unixism

[John W. Kennedy]

Craig A. Finseth wrote:
> Wrong.  The / was chosen as the command line option separator because
> whoever wrote MSDOS was looking to CP/M, who modelled their commands
> after a PDP-11 operating system (RT-11?).  Consider the "PIP" command.

> When they went to MS/DOS 2.0 and needed path separators, they found
> that "/" was already taken, so they used "\".  But there was a hidden
> way to tell the command interpreter that it could use "-" for options.

Except, of course, that it was useless, because 99% of programs did 
their own option parsing, and still do.  The hidden option only lasted 
one .1 subrelease, as I recall.

> And in all systems starting with 2.0, the system calls have taken "/"
> and "\" interchangably.

...which is /one/ thing that the FLOSS community can honestly thank them 
for.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"Compact is becoming contract,
Man only earns and pays."
   -- Charles Williams.  "Bors to Elayne:  On the King's Coins"