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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

So, the question would be, why would Windows not remove this limitation from the main OS and only keep it on backward compatibility mechanisms (like the DOS prompt which runs - or used to - in virtual 8086 mode?)

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They probably can't remove it as long as they have Win32. Real Windows programs sometimes do things like fopen("con") or CreateFile("nul", ...) for the same reason a program might open /dev/null or /dev/tty on Linux. I guess you could ask why Microsoft didn't remove this feature when they created Win32, or why they still allow forms like "C:\dir\nul.txt".

But even so, why hasn't Win32 supported \dev\con since forever? Then programs could use that and the old stupid way could be phased out.

You'd have to modify and recompile the old programs, which may not be possible.

No you don't. Run them in compatibility mode. You often need to do that anyway. A _lot_ changed between PC-DOS 1 and Windows 10. It's ridiculous that this didn't.

Compatibility mode applies to processes, though, which raises a problem with batch files (or scripts) that use those things, as you'd then have to make cmd always run in compatibility mode (or Python, or Perl, etc.).

I don't think Python and Perl existed back then. You do have a point with batch files. Well, maybe some sort of compatibility mode should exist for them too.

They could have moved those into NFPS root.

My guess is, because of interoperability with older Windows machines on the local network, but I'm not sure.

There is very little motivation to fix this, and I can understand that.

The fix might potentially break some apps. So at the end there could be more pissed people after the fix, than there is now unhappy about the file naming restriction.

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