Hacker News Reader

Comment by irshadshalu | Hacker News Reader

can't speak about the very recent updates, but windows have been consistent and adamant on keeping the backward compatibility. they still use reserved file names for io devices so that 30+ year old printers can still work, and you can still open a 2000s doc file in office 365. (I'm looking at you Apple, who made many of the 32 bit apps I loved useless)

relevant video: https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI (Tom Scott: Why you can't use CON as filename in windows)

View on HN

Actually you can use CON as a filename in Windows, you just have to use the right API. The command:

    type CON > "\\?\C:\CON"

will create a file named CON. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming... has some details about this.

Even the, now official, merge of UWP with Win32 is planned to take years as they don't want to introduced hard breaks for those that decided to bet on WinRT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com