Shebang line on Windows?
Dave Angel
davea at davea.name
Mon Feb 25 21:23:58 EST 2013
On 02/25/2013 09:08 PM, Michael Torrie wrote:
> <snip>
> This is a reminder to me how much we Linux users look at Windows as a
> quaint anomaly with it's apparently backwards ways of doing things (like
> backslash directory separators, like CP/M did),
Actually the reason MSDOS used backslash was because it had already used
the forward slash for a switch-character. Then for version 2, with hard
disks being supported for the first time, they used the backslash
instead. At the time I talked them into supporting a "switchchar" call
to change to using the dash for switch character, and slash for
subdirectories.
But the idea was never publicized, so it never caught on. And future
versions of utilities generally paid no attention to the value of
switchchar.
By the time Windows split off from MSDOS (NT 3.1), the support in the OS
for both slash and backslash was well established. But the utilities
never grew up.
Yes, using the slash as a switch-character was inherited from CP/M,
through QDOS, then MSDOS.
On some of the old teletypes, if the data was coming in fast enough, you
could see the first character of the next line printed before the typing
element reached the left margin. So newline was then spelled CR/LF/NULL
or even CR/LF/NULL/NULL
Buffering? What's that?
--
DaveA
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