BACKSLASH RIGHT: SLASH This is a slash: /. Because the top of it leans forward, it is sometimes

<span style="font-size:18px;">BACKSLASH

RIGHT:		
SLASH


This is a slash: /. Because the top of it leans forward, it is sometimes called a “forward slash.”


This is a backslash: \. Notice the way it leans back, distinguishing it from the regular slash.


Slashes are often used to indicate directories and subdirectories in computer systems such as Unix and in World Wide Web addresses. Unfortunately, many people, assuming “backslash” is some sort of technical term for the regular slash, use the term incorrectly, which risks confusing those who know enough to distinguish between the two but not enough to realize that Web addresses rarely contain backslashes.


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Backslash

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The backslash (\) is a typographical mark (glyph) used mainly in computing and is the mirror image of the common slash (/). It is sometimes called a hack, whack, escape (from C/UNIX), reverse slash, slosh, backslant, downhill, backwhack, and in rare occasions, bash, reverse slant, and reversed virgule.^[1][2] In Unicode, it is encoded at U+005C \ reverse solidus (HTML: \).

History

Bob Bemer introduced the "\" character into ASCII^[3] on September 18, 1961,^[4] as the result of character frequency studies. In particular the \ was introduced so that the ALGOL boolean operators ∧ (AND) and ∨ (OR) could be composed in ASCII as "/\" and "\/" respectively.^[4][5] Both these operators were included in early versions of the C programming language supplied with Unix V6, Unix V7 and more currently BSD 2.11.