> 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.

/me turns to a tattered and faded page of a disintegrating DOS manual
and reads from the holy text.

 "The number of the left arrow shalt be 27."
		-- the Gospel according to DOS, page 437.

/me powers on 486

/me makes exactly 6 keystrokes, counting the boot menu.

A left pointing appeareth on my screen.

A smalltalk source file encoded with a char 27 will display correctly in
a DOS text editor. (hold ALT then type "27" on the neumeric keypad, then
release the ALT key)

Okay, okay, Dos does everything faster... Most people can barely type
their user name on linux in 6 keystrokes much less hit the enter...

Because linux sucks, it cannot display this charactor, instead it will
be interpreted as a control charactor and lead to all kinds of mayhem. =(
(all code pages are inferior to 437).


-- 
Don't let your schoolwork get in the way of your learning.

http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/