Understood and agreed. I generally recommend relative, forward-slashed paths in every case, until and if some Windows utility decides to complain, which they usually don't anymore. The main holdout is the shell, which Windows continues, I assume just to be pissy. Fair enough; the UNIX equivalent, Bash, deliberately pretends to uncomprehend "\r".
I never use hardcoded absolute paths, since a relative path or a user-specified path is always (can't think of counterexample, and never ran into one) better.
Hmm I didn't know this, never really viewing Macs as suitable for development. It's good it has converged to the forward-slash convention though.
You'll see the same behavior in C, so either the standard library does the appropriate conversion before the ultimate syscall, or the syscall itself understands forward-slashes.
Ian