Hi

I was the guy that puts the mess. I think that people that understand 
the field (= not me) and have a
large view on the topic should really come up with a good solution. 
Thanks for your sketch.

stef


On Vendredi, oct 17, 2003, at 18:12 Europe/Zurich, Yoshiki Ohshima 
wrote:

>   Hello,
>
>>> And in new code, those who like to assign with underscores with no
>>> whitespace around them, can even continue doing so, as long as they 
>>> don't
>>> have x, y, and x_y in scope, which might well mean that they will 
>>> never
>>> write an unintended ambiguity in their entire careers. Should it 
>>> happen
>>> anyway, a simple space will suffice to clear things up.
>>
>> It's not just a matter of new code. It is possible that a 
>> re-compilation of
>> old code would happen.
>
>   One thing we could do is:
>
>   1. Use m17n package.
>
>   2  Make the left arrow (U+2190) legal assignment syntax.
>
>   3. Fix the existing glyphs so that the 16r5F character is shown as
>      an underscore.
>
>   4. Hack the ParagraphEditor so that we can enter underscore and left
>      arrow without any OS support.  (This should be as easy as the
>      mechanism I wrote in the response to Darius.)
>
>   5. Come up with new file out extensions.  (Somehow I'm thinking .csm
>      and .stm. would be ok.)
>
>   6. When a .st or .cs file is loaded, the 16r5F characters in it (but
>      not in the string constants) are converted to left arrows.  When
>      .csm or .stm is loaded, it doesn't do this.  (The rationale is
>      that the 16r5F characters in the old files were indeed left
>      arrows.)
>
>   7. Convert all methods in .changes and .sources so that the
>      underscores get converted to left arrow (U+2190).
>
>   8. Make 16r5F character an legal character for names and make it
>      illegal as assignment character.  (So, until this point, we still
>      can't use the underscore in part of the names.)
>
>   The upside of this strategy is that we can support existing stuff in
> the base image and out of base image.  Also, we can let programmers
> use both ':=' and the left arrow for the assignment syntax.  The down
> side is that it'll change the .sources at some point; it has to be
> done when we change the major version.  (While we are at 3.x versions,
> we can move to #6 in the above list.)
>
> -- Yoshiki
>
>
>
>