Re: A simple hate today.

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From: spc (Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner)
Subject: Re: A simple hate today.
Date: 08:28 on 29 May 2006
It was thus said that the Great Peter da Silva once stated:
> 
> On May 27, 2006, at 6:24 PM, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> > On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 01:40:39PM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
> >> "-?" is a MSDOS-ism.
> 
> > you mean of course "/?"  :)
> 
>  From MS-DOS 2.11 through MS-DOS 5 there was a variable "SWITCHAR". If 
> it was set to "/" (the default) the switch character was "/" and the 
> path element separator was "\". If it was set to "-" then the switch 
> character was "-" and the path element separator was "/".

  And internally (not COMMAND.COM, but in the kernel [1] itself) MS-DOS
supported both '/' and '\' as a path separator.  I'm not sure how many
programs supported SWITCHAR [2], but I know that once I learned about it,
my programs from then on checked.

  -spc (Gah!  I still remember this stuff!  Aaah!)

[1]	As much as a single tasking, non-reentrant interrupt controller
	could be called a "kernel".

[2]	There was semi-officially-documented system call to set and get
	the current setting of SWITCHAR.


There's stuff above here

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