Windows filesystems have no problem using either forward or backward slashes as path separators (this has been the case since back in the DOS days). The only real issue is that Windows command-line processors (or, more specifically, Windows-native command-line utilities) tend to interpret forward slashes as option specifiers rather than path components. Therefore, you need a backslashed path if you need to pass a path to a Windows command run as a subprocess. Also, Windows API calls (and methods from higher-level languages that call the Windows API) that return paths will use backslashes, so even if you aren’t passing them to subprocesses, you’ll need to normalize them.
