[ENH] Display := when pretty printing ( [sm][et][er][cd] [approved] )

ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Wed Oct 15 06:34:37 UTC 2003


Hi richard

You are right and I'm wrong.this was easy because I'm complete naive in 
this topic.

Ok but my point was that it really depends where we go.
My first name is spelled with an accent é so this is just now that I 
start to receive international
mail, bills or email not written st&*phane. So sure ASCII is bad. Now 
Squeak can have
a really fancy wonderful character set.
Three remarks:
	- My point that it should be consistent,

	-  Then I really wonder why Squeak that tries to be ANSI (you were the 
first one to claim that for initialize)
	is not ANSI with assignemnt. This is fun to have different 
compatibility policy. But I can live with that because I do not 	care 
about a bad standard.

	- Third my goal is that Smalltalk or any new Smalltalk-based-better 
system grows and get more programmers
	Now if I want to attract programmers of other languages: I do not know 
any mainstream language (I'm certainly wrong
	here again I'm not expert but just an experienced promotor of 
Smalltalk) that does not have an ASCII basis
	meaning for me: that I can type with vi (that I hate), emacs or 
**any** text editor.
	Or this means that we should be able to say: you want to edit Squeak 
code, ok use this text editor with this encodings
	if there are some out that can handle that. because if you remember 
the balloon on the island, I would like to have the 	same for Smalltalk 
(been able to escape the image): been able to script it, to use it to 
script other application, on 	integrate with C in a way that is not for 
expert. That's why I think that what dave simmons is doing is 
interesting (even
	if I do not like the exuberance of his object-model).

So sure we can be the one that does not have the problems you mention 
but right now the only thing I see is inconsistencies everywhere. So 
may be I'm just too pragmatic.

So as I say I'm wrong but I feel like in a museum sometimes (You know 
if I had a target character with red and white
I would put it here in the text so that people can shot at me).



Stef


> 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.
>
>



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