Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!panda!teddy!jpn
From: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Microsoft linker and /
Keywords: link delimiters patch
Message-ID: <4607@teddy.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 88 16:54:51 GMT
References: <363@vilya.UUCP> <105@ucrmath.UUCP> <10059@santra.UUCP>
Reply-To: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 20

>Personally I prefer "-".  It's more like *UNIX*...  If Microsoft had
>to make DOS so much UNIX lookalike then why didn't they make it
>properly instead of leaving it halfway?

Ah, evolution.  Remember that MSDOS 1.0 was not much like UNIX at all:
It was patterned after CPM (and did a fair job of emulation, at that!)
It is CP/M that uses '/' as a option introducer character.  Note that
MSDOS 1.0 did not have subdirectories at all.

When MSDOS 2.0 was introduced, they had the choice of being backward
compatible with 1.0, or being compatible with UNIX.  Evidently there
was a split within Microsoft, because the "SWITCHCHAR" hack was put
in to accomodate both camps.  Lots of other unix-like features were
added at this time:  I think it would have been better to change the
option character also.

Unfortunately, the MSDOS 1.0 (CPM) compatible syntax seems to have
won out (BOO HISS).  Luckily, this usually only affects command line
parsing, since MSDOS is happy with either '/' or '\' as a pathname
seperator (YAY!)