[PD] newbie question about "dropped"

[Thomas Grill]

> i don't think that this is the main reason for not allowing some more 
> characters.
> if you allow backslash as an escaping character in pd, you will get 
> into serious problems when windows users try to load 
> "C:\files\patch.pd", or should it read "C:\Program\ Files\patch.pd" ? 
> what does this mean ??
>
Hmm, i don't understand... what's the problem about an encoding 
"C:\\Program\ Files\\patch.pd", or as used in pd "C:/Program\ 
Files/patch.pd" ?
It's not only about filenames... as symbols can hold all possible 
characters, we (or me at least) would also like to enter it in the patch 
editor. There are numerous applications (like a text-based composition 
that i'm working on now) that would profit from this possibility.

> and windowsers will immediately start using backslash as directory 
> delimiter, while unixers will use it as escape.
>
Since i use Windows, OSX and Linux, also with mounted volumes across 
system-boundaries, i don't see why others shouldn't be able to handle that.

I really can't think of why \ should be dropped if it's possible to use 
it as _the_ common-place escape character. Maybe someone can enlighten 
me about Miller's possible reasons to do so.
But there's always the devel branch where such things can be tried out...

best greetings,
Thomas