context is that it’s a folder on Windows that isn’t shown by default so you have to open the “run” menu then type it in. Like a cheatcode for a computer.
or at least that’s how it felt the first time I found it when I was like 12 trying to find my Minecraft screenshots
I find the whole convention of denoting variables with
%foo%weird. Like, delimit it at both ends?$foois much more elegant and the character looks less weirdIt makes sense if you want to concatenate strings, which is probably pretty much what happens when you type that into the path input.
This way, you could create a string like “D:/%appdata%/local/minecraft” Whereas without the trailing %, you would need a space to separate it from the text, which would result in “D:/Users/Public/AppData /local/minecraft”.
(i havent used windows in a while and those paths are from memory, they might be wrong)
Ok, that actually makes sense tbf
I do remember from waaay back in the day using the same syntax in DOS batch files. Shit’s probably just been carried over since then.
Technically
$fooalso delimits at both ends, the second character is just a newline or whitespace character. However with%foo%it is unambiguous where the variable begins and ends.Also I said newline or whitespace, what about special characters?
Look at
$foo+$baram I adding two variables together? Is the first variable$fooor$foo+?i’m yet to see any language that has variables and ‘+’ operator, while accepting also ‘+’ in variable names at the same time. Same goes for basically every operator
Didn’t JS do it? Or was it Lua? I don’5 remember but i am sure i saw a language that did some shit like that…