this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
160 points (99.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

33315 readers
874 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I still don't get why the backslash is on keyboards to begin with. I don't think I've ever seen anyone write a slash backward with a pen. And even if folks do, you could've had only one slash anyways. Like, people are going to understand what it means, whether it's / or \.

I guess, it not being used for much else, does at least make it useful for escaping stuff and for Windows to use as path separator.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It seems not to have much pre-computer history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash#History

[IBM’s Bob Bemer] said the \ was needed so that the ALGOL Boolean operators (logical conjunction) and (logical disjunction) could be composed using /\ and \/ respectively.

Only time I've ever used \ in a non computer context was in mathematics as "without" in set theory. As an escape character it's pretty practical too :)

[–] ddplf@szmer.info 4 points 1 week ago

Stop saying that, it has it's uses /;_;\