The backslash????

Question

why dont they call this \

the slash back???

Answer 1

because nobody is going to slash anybody back.

when a qualifier is used in conjunction with a noun the correct way to do it (and that which is commonly done) is to place the qualifier first and the noun following it.

so since this slash is slanted backward..

you get the rest of the picture.

I

--------------------------------

Frank - I'm taken back by what you say. the backslash is one of the cornerstones of the Unix operating system. It is used there to write "escape sequences" (ex. '\n' for newline,'\r' for carriage return in C, numerous uses in shell scripts, reg-ex and Perl) without which Unix would not be half of what it is.

Answer 2

Traditional English language construction.  Slash is the noun, back is the adjective modifying it.  We speak of the red light instead of the light red, as the Latin languages do.

There's a much better question.  When Microsoft threw away most of Unix to build DOS, why did they replace the traditional slash character with this strange backslash, which no one else uses for anything?  Oh, how different history would have unfolded!