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