Bob Bemer is to blame.

I had fun helping Jennifer fix a sinister problem with the entries she imported from Movable Type, yesterday. The backslashes were missing. I cannot describe what a backslash(a.k.a Reverse Solidus, or Reverse Virgule or Reverse Slant) looks like, cause I cannot type a backslash and have it appear in this post*. That is because WordPress runs on backslashes.

Yes, it has remained a closely guarded secret, and I will let it out. WordPress is powered by backslashes. WordPress eats backslashes.

An unsuspecting user left a comment on a WordPress FAQ entry, and he mailed me expressing desperation at the mysterious disappearance of the backslash from both the post and the comment.

Bob Bemer is the man to blame for the extra work the WordPress devs have been putting in lately, especially Ryan Boren (who has been systematically working towards eliminating this problem.)

To get to the point, Bob Bemer added the backslash to ASCII to be able to represent the logical symbols for logical AND and OR in ALGOL. An interesting read.

* Just kidding: WordPress users can represent a backslash in their posts using “& # 0 9 2 ;”(without the spaces or the quotes, thus : \