The deal with path separators has to do with the difference between the classic Mac OS (9 and lower) and Mac OS X. Classic Macs used their own path system, which used :s as the path separator (e.g., ":Macintosh HD:Documents:Arc:tut.txt"). When the switch to OS X came, suddenly everything was based on Unix, so file paths became sane (e.g., "/Users/username/Documents/Arc/tut.txt" or even "~/Documents/Arc/tut.txt"). Nevertheless, in the name of backwards compatibility, many things still display paths in the old format, the GUI pretends that :s in file names are actually /s, and AppleScript deals natively with old-style filenames.
