Emacs on Windows, isn't ~ supposed to be home dir?

[Xah Lee]

in emacsW32 on Windows,  “~/” points to
“c:/Users/xah/AppData/Roaming/”
but i was expecting it to point to:
“c:/Users/xah/”.

can anyone know why? Is this just a emacsW32 quirk or is this supposed
to be that way? Is this just a Windows env var that i didn't set, or
is it some emacs setup? (am not familiar with windows env var or
cmd.exe)

am asking because i have many init files and elisp functions that take
a path, and on unix ~ is user home root.

thanks.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄