Marcus Denker wrote:

>
> On 08.03.2006, at 09:38, Dan Corneanu wrote:
>
>> Marcus Denker wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Before 3.9 goes beta, we will have relaced all the _ by :=, and
>>> everything will be fine.
>>>
>>>       Marcus
>>>
>> What happend with '<-' ? I kind of liked it more than ':=' or '_'.
>>
>
> There is no backarrow on my keyboard, and there is no backarrow
> in the ASCII font. Especially, it is *extremely* strange to just co-opt
> the underscore.

Actually, it's the other way round... early versions of ASCII (1963) had 
the left and up arrow symbols. Only later (1967) they morphed into 
underscore and circumflex accent (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII). Looks like the early Smalltalk 
implementors had an ASCII-1963 manual floating around, or they were 
printing out source code on older printers with those glyphs...
My first "real" computer (a TRS-80) also had left arrow and up arrow 
symbols in its character ROM (and no lowercase letters until I soldered 
an additional memory chip onto the 7-bit screen memory...), so it seemed 
very natural to me when I was introduced to Smalltalk a number of years 
later.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin