the legacy of dos
Let me just say that developing cross-platform software is one of the more royal pains out there. Java, built from the ground up with cross-platform in mind does a better job than most to maintain a level of abstraction for the developer. However, a universal sticking point is what character the directory separator is. Unix, the Web, and the rest of the sane world use ‘/’ to separate directories. This makes sense, since in most modern (hell, nearly all) programming languages, the ‘' is used as a prefix to an escape character....