ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
	My naive question is why do we have to have graphics such as the
	arrow in the method text.

There is nothing more "graphics" about arrows than there is about
about "#" or "$" or "<".  In fact the left and up arrows were perfectly
respectable characters in the ASCII 63 character set; if you can find a
model 33 Teletype you'll find them on the keyboard.

	It seems to me that this legacy complicates a lot the story.
	
If you mean the legacy of ASCII, a contingent, quirky, and somewhat
haphazard collection of characters determined in large part by the
deliberate choice that some characters should be visually ambiguous
to serve multiple purposes, then I agree, ASCII _does_ complicate a
lot of things.  " is at one and the same time left double quote,
right double quote, inch sign, and diaeresis/umlaut.  ' is at one
and the same right right single quote, apostrophe, and acute accent.
` is left single quote and grave accent.  , is comma but is also
supposed to be used for comma below _and_ cedilla.  / is solidus
and cancellation slash and slash for cent sign.  It is an explicit
part of the ASCII standard that characters are to be composed by
overstriking using backspace and carriage return (so using carriage
return to mean newline as Squeak does is *definitely* not kosher;
while "newline" was in fact an intentional alternative reading of LF).

I really don't see any reason why a programming language in an age of
laser printers, 100 dot per inch screens, and 21-bit character sets
should use clumsy subterfuges to fit into the mould of a 7-bit character
set designed for electric typewriters.  If I can use left arrow and up
arrow in HTML (and I can; I provided Squeak patches to make "printing
out" use them when generating HTML and it greatly improves the look of
the result), why shouldn't I be able to use them in Squeak?  (And
conversely, if I can use "_" and "^" in HTML, why shouldn't I be able
to use them _as well_ in Squeak?)

What's _really ridiculous is that I have 48 keys on my keyboard that
correspond to printing characters, 4 that correspond to control
characters (Esc, Tab, Back Space, and Enter), and about 67 that do not
correspond to any character.  I have more non-character keys than character
keys.  Yet I have 189 printing characters in my character set!  So the
shift key nearly doubles 48 => 95 (shift-space = space, so not 96), but
that still leaves nearly half of my character set with no key at all.
(For a Windows user, the proportion is even worse, because Windows has
an extra 32 printing characters.)  I can put up with typing
Compose-A-E and so on, but I don't have to like it, and I _don't_ have
to let the limitations of the keyboard stop me using a perfectly good
character.