[Newbies] Left-arrow for assignment

[Dominic Espinosa]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:40:58AM +1200, Michael van der Gulik wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:20:25 -0400
> Dominic Espinosa <dcespin at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've experimented with Squeak a bit, and have also seen the debate on
> > the assignment symbols and how to handle the left-arrow, ':=', and
> > underscore at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5751. However, I want to use
> > the left-arrow in my code. Is this possible? It seems like translation
> > from ':=' to left-arrow and vice-versa should be straightforward
> > (indeed, a sed script could do it).
> 
> 
> I think that most people agree that the := should be used instead of a left arrow in code.

I can understand a certain preference for ':=' over left-arrow, but this
is 2008. = ) I don't know why we should stick with ASCII all the time.
Haskell, for instance, would look a lot nicer with arrow glyphs, lambda,
and a few other symbols. Since ':=' and left-arrow both just mean
'assign' in this circumstance, why not let it be displayed as one or
the other according to preference?

> To use the left arrow, get a fine-tipped permanent marker and very
> carefully draw an arrow head on the '_' key on your keyboard. Then,
> you can use this key for when you want a left arrow in your code. You
> may need to choose a font that has a left arrow in it as well.
> 
> If you want to get fancy (and I encourage you to do so for education's
> sake :-) ), you could try mapping the underscore key to output a left
> arrow character (←, Unicode 0x2190) using whatever your operating
> system provides, and then modify the Squeak compiler to use that for
> modification. 

Indeed, using '_' for assignment seems repugnant to a lot of people.
Some of the debate in the previous swiki link focused on this aspect,
and the issues in having '_' have such a non-standard meaning in Squeak,
as well as the need to use '_' in circumstances other than assignment.
Maybe left-arrow could be internally represented as
':=', filed-out as ':=', etc, but displayed as left-arrow according to
preferences. Additionally, a key-binding could be used for inserting the
left-arrow while typing.

I'm not sure what kinds of issues this would raise in how source code is
represented; I recall someone saying that the representation would have
to change significantly for this to work. But perhaps there's an easy
way to do it?

Thanks again.