> [...] for compatibility reasons.
For compatibility with DOS 1.x no less [0]! That's 37 years and counting of backward compatibility...
[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031022-00/?p=...
For compatibility with DOS 1.x no less [0]! That's 37 years and counting of backward compatibility...
[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031022-00/?p=...
When they were added Microsoft could have chosen to put special devices in their own directory (eg C:\dev on each device, or reserved D: for devices, or any number of other schemes). Instead they decided to make these special device names be implicit members of every directory on every drive.
Similar to make treating whitespace as significant, the decision to be compatible with the relatively few existing users doomed many, many more users in the future to endless problems. Backwards compatibility has a non-zero cost to users too!
Random example: Here are SuperUser answers written this year, only a few months ago, employing this idiom.
That doesn't convince me they actually thought this through at the time.