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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I still hear ads giving URLs with inexplicable backslashes in them. "Visit our website at foo.com backslash baz"

I think few people know the difference, so they say backslash when they mean forward slash.

The wrong way round always seemed more logical to me: you write either slash from top to bottom, so for a forward slash your pen moves backwards and vice versa.

It seems normal to me to speak of the angle of handwriting as slanting forwards or backwards, corresponding to slash and backslash. Most people’s handwriting is angled either upright or slightly forwards—leaning into the writing; backwards is uncommon.

The way I remember it is to think of the slash as a little person facing to the right (the direction that text flows). Is the person leaning forward or backward?

How often do you use this device?

I feel like I hardly understand the idea, because a / and \ is just as distinct as a b and a p. We don't make mnemonics for those?

Naturally, the occurrence rate of b and p in people's experience, as well as the circumstances in which they are semantically distinct, are also relevant...

Yeah, honestly not very often. Mostly they're second nature to me. I mainly just think of it when there's a topic of / vs \ like in this thread.

You now have me wondering whether I have, at any point in my lifetime, written a backslash with a pen. It's an interesting thought that possibly I never have.

Never had to write down a DOS or Windows path?

I still hear ads giving URLs with inexplicable backslashes in them.

Can confirm. Just yesterday on NPR.

The average person doesn't know the difference between a regular forward slash and a back slash. Why should they?

> Why should they?

The average person does know (or at least should know) the difference between an exclamation mark and a question mark; it's part of literacy. One could argue that knowing the difference between a forward slash and a backslash is part of digital literacy (and that it's a worthy goal for the average person to have digital literacy).

An exclamation point and question mark look distinctively different. A forward slash and backward slash may as well be identical.

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