Day: July 15, 2025

R is good with using forward slashes in Windows, actually you kind of have to do that or escape backslashes which R treats as escape characters.

This is not actually a feature of R, it’s actually a side effect of how the Windows API works, as internally it can take either forward or back slashes, even though many programs still insist on dumb backslashes and kick back out backslashes. The same is true with Python programs and C programs calling the Windows API.

But most other programs in Windows don’t appreciate forward slashes. Any OS derived from Unix has used forward slashes, since well 1970 … and the internet too. Multics in 1960s used > but Unix uses that for redirecton, so forward slashes were chosen in 1970.

I think the world would appreciate the president mandating the use of forward slashes in directory paths. Plus let’s get rid of letter named drives, that’s just stupid and old fashioned when I think by at least 1970, more intelligent operating systems like Unix derivatives, could mount a drive in any path that is a subset of root.