Re: Cannot change to 'C:\' (root) on Windows

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 14 November 2005 08:33 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> 
> Exactly. Thus, 'C:\tmp' is really C:\tmp and not C:<TAB>tmp, and '\' is 
> really \ (1 char) and not anything else.

The two cases are not parallel.   \t  is a "special character" that
is expanded to <tab> in double quotes but not in single quotes.

\'  or \"   are not "special characters", they are escaped quotes.
If you do not allow some mechanism for escaping quotes, then you
cannot represent a quote inside a quoted string.


gnuplot> a = "foo\"bar"
gnuplot> print a
foo"bar

gnuplot> b = 'foo\'bar'
gnuplot> print b
foo\'bar

If there is a bug here, it is not the fact that the backslash
escapes the single-quote.  It is that the print routine should
know enough not to _print_ the backslash in such a case.




-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195