On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, ducasse wrote:

> On Jeudi, oct 16, 2003, at 02:02 Europe/Zurich, Richard A. O'Keefe
> wrote:

> > The ANSI Smalltalk standard says that "_" is a character that is usable
> > in identifiers.  I think this is a Good Thing and I would like Squeak
> > to
> > support it.  The idea of putting space between words to make text much
> > more readable was discovered about 500 years ago.  It's time Squeak
> > caught up.
>
> I wonder what vendors pushed this bad idea. I think that this is really
> not a problem
> and none of the current Smalltalk have method written that way and this
> would be a bad idea to start
> this is been different for the sake of it. I prefer to see Squeak
> evolving for real change
[snip]

Richard and I went round on this a few years back :)

But there is one excellent reason for allowing _ in identifiers (aside
from compatibilty, which is a good reason): it allows for various mappings
(e.g., writing wrappers for functions in different languages that happen
to have _ in names), and for certain synthetic method generation
situtations. I think this has come up for, say, RDBMS mappings.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.