this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

boomers still saying aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

Okay, that's a clever use of that meme.

[–] 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.

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

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

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 :)

[–] PanArab@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I think macOS still supports : for directory delimiting, a legacy of Classic Mac OS, though it has been deprecated for a while.

Windows NT supports both / and \.

: as a directory limiter is crazy 😅
(Never been an apple person)
Good to know that NT also supports / though. Somehow it never occured to me to try.