> But my ask is: Why the binaries for MS Win platforms are not compiled > in the similar way as in UNIX, it means that colons and semicolons > are changeable? The existence of semicolons (inspired from DOS) mixed > with slashs (inspired from UNIX) in texmf.cnf is not so aesthetic. you need the : in windows as part of the path to specify a drive letter. c:/texmf/tex// David