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Comment by rangibaby | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! I wonder why they changed that particular character and not one that is literally everywhere in DOS.

Using ¥ as backslash still works in Windows and legacy apps (in OSX option+¥ gives a "real" \.)

This leads to some interesting situations: Word documents filled with ¥ where there should be \ and vice versa. By interesting I mean extremely annoying.

Another caveat is that anything hardcoded to use the tilde ~ will probably break because it is mapped to a completely key on Japanese keyboards. This causes endless fun in DOSBOX or even newer games: to get the console in Doom 3 I had to edit the source and recompile it with the console key mapped to another character.

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Several positions in the table ({ | } [ \ ] @) were meant for "national variants". I guess those characters were deemed unimportant at the time.

Here is some more info: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html#national-ascii

Thus, the characters that appear in those positions - including those in US-ASCII - are somewhat "unsafe" in international data transfer

...

Systems that support ISO Latin 1 in principle may still reflect the use of national variants of ASCII in some details; for example, an ASCII character might get printed or displayed according to some national variant. Thus, even "plain ASCII text" is thereby not always portable from one system or application to another.

That's awesome! Hard to believe that systems have worked as well as they have. It's pretty obvious nobody was expecting that one day all computers would have to read each other's data pretty much constantly.

So I guess the question is: why did the DOS developers pick the character that happens to vary from region to region? I guess they didn't know?

As a wild guess, I would say that in the days before the internet made "international data transfer" something a regular person would encounter frequently, the thought just never occurred to them.

I wonder why they changed that particular character and not one that is literally everywhere in DOS.

I've wondered about that as well. My guess is that they looked at it and thought 'who needs two kinds of slash anyway?' I would love to know the actual thought behind that choice.

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