how about introducing a secondary parser on top of the code editor that you can enable disable at will and can create "code shortcuts" using such symbols ? it will then store them as regular pharo syntax without affecting the pharo system. Its an idea I am thinking playing with but not so much for special class names but rather omitting the class names altogether and create shorter version of calling a method that is more English like, like :

open "mydoc.pdf" in documents.

display pdf.

go to page 4.

print page��

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 6:13 PM, phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:

Of course. But there are some other things that are available.

��, `, ? comes to mind.

Phil

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:

On 10 Sep 2014, at 16:38, phil@highoctane.be wrote:

> I was playing around with the idea of using stuff like in jQuery, where we do have the�� '$' function that would do a lot of things.
>
> But one cannot create such elements as
>
> SlotClassBuilder>>validateClassName
>�� "Validate the new class name. Raise warning if invalid."
>
>�� name
>�� detect: [ :c | (c isAlphaNumeric or: [ c = $_ ]) not ]
>�� ifFound: [ :c | InvalidGlobalName signal: 'Invalid character: ''' , c printString , '''' for: name ].
>�� name first canBeGlobalVarInitial
>�� ifFalse: [ InvalidGlobalName signal: 'Class name does not start with a valid Global Var Initial' for: name ]
>
> doesn't let us.
>
> Is there a reason for that (ok, we have $ for chars, and #, ... and other things but still).
>

The problem is that $ is part of the smalltalk grammar for symbols, $ can not be a variable name.

��$asdasd

is parsed as a message send to the character a, for example.

�� Marcus