i looks like it take both when i just tried it now. whats so bad about backslashes?

By default in file explorer it displays paths in a more graphical way with arrows between each folder and shortening special paths like the user's home folder or desktop

https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Windows-File-Explorer.jpg

If you click into that to copy or edit the path as text it uses backslashes

It's fine, I just prefer regular ones because that's what I'm used to.

Also, backslash is the common escape character, so if in Linux, somehow you have a file with a newline in its name, or you want to write the name of a file with a space in its name without quotes, you would do cat new\nline or rm spaced\ name.

So when I see a backslash it just looks wrong to me and I wanted to be dramatic.

you should look up the php namespace separator one day

the solution here is to meet in the middle and use | as a path separator

or we could use ¥ like they do in japan

i believe windows using the backslash to this day is the result of an absurd level of backwards compatibility. ms-dos didn't have directories originally, and they used / for switches instead of -. so for file directories, they used \.

read this pdf for some fun examples of the problems they have had to deal with, here's one of my favorites:

"One card game tried to make changes to the system.ini file but ended up destroying it. The game read the system.ini file a line at a time into an 80-character buffer, made any necessary changes, and wrote the result to a temporary file. If any line contained more than 80 characters, the buffer overflowed and corrupted the next variable on the stack, which happened to be the name of the temporary file! Once the changes were made, the program deleted the system.ini file and renamed the temporary file to system.ini. But the rename operation failed because the name of the temporary file was corrupted by the extra-long line.The result: a system with no system configuration file.In other words, installing this program rendered your system unbootable.The fix from the operating system side was to go through all the components of the system that used the system.ini file and make sure none of them ever wrote lines longer than 80 characters."

i have my machine's locale set to japan because you need to in order to make utau (a voice synthesis program) work and god the yen symbol thing is so weird and kinda annoying lol. thankfully in the terminal they provide fonts you can choose that render \ correctly

Is it not just ::

The card game that overwrote the system.ini with garbage got development priority over the operating system?

Gosh I'll bet someone quit over that decision.

:: is the T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM operator, used for accessing static class members. \ is the namespace separator.

😐

Oh right I remember there was a thing making the rounds a while ago about that name, a few years back.

similar thing is "tab vs spaces" shown in Silicone Valley series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsoOG6ZeyUI

Spaces are better

I wish my textbooks would tell tales :( I'm paying out the fucking ear, Pearson, at least give me some topical anecdotes to soothe me when I'm not understanding anything :(

that's the policy. people don't care why it doesn't work, they just want their software to work and not break. and microsoft has their employees make sure that happens.

it's kinda interesting in the sense that when you look at the two big companies making closed source operating systems, they are completely opposite on that. can you imagine if microsoft were to cut 32-bit application support like apple did?

the factoid that brought me into the tabs camp after years of being a spaces die-hard is that tabs are better for accessibility because they allow people with specific vision needs to configure the spacing of their code more easily

It's possible for code formatters to automatically change it either way, but it's not fair to require people to set that up.

IMO, the ideal is to have a config for editors that automatically code formats it, so individual users can set their code formatter up however they want, and before they start editing they can format it to how they like, and before it goes in to the repository it gets broken down to the AST and formatted according to the projects style guide