On Nov 14, 2009, at 4:38 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
I feel somewhat responsible for this branch of the thread :( For the record, I am freely willing to "give up" underscore assignment. The idea of allowing it via a whitespace trick seemed worthy of due consideration, but I am liking it less as the debate continues.
IIRC, the whole mess got started over a desire to have a single keypress for assignment. Sadly, I was not consulted, because that could have been accomplished as an optional feature of the editor (_ inserts :=, backing up over = removes a preceding :, turn it off if you want no part of it; done), but it was instead allowed to seep into the compiler and the sources.
No, the _ used to be rendered as a left-arrow. This comes from a time far, far away when there where less standards...build-your-own keyboad times. It was a left-over from Smalltalk 72 which had lots of graphical characters as part of the language. The _ was removed from all Smalltalks, just not from Squeak. This was because it felt to certain people that going ascii was a mistake anyway and that more graphical stuff should come again, not less. And removing the left-arrow betrays that vision. The fun thing is: I am all for experiments to go beyond text. But than it should be *real*. Just keeping the _ as a kind of "look, we are special" is idiotic. So we removed the funny character left-arrow and let it render what the _ (so people can deal with external code, c, or database rows...). Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- denker@acm.org http://www.marcusdenker.de