I don't have time for this; this is my last response.

Juan Vuletich wrote:
> Joshua Gargus wrote:
>> Juan Vuletich wrote:
>>  
>>> There's not a real consensus in this area. Many people (me included)
>>> really prefer the left arrow for assignment and will not accept others
>>> to prevent us from doing so. Please don't promise that. Switch to :=
>>> only if you want.
>>>     
>>
>> I usually agree with what you write, but this is simply wrong.  There is
>> not *unanimous* consensus that left-arrow should be deprecated, but when
>> has there ever been, in the Squeak community?  However, there is
>> certainly a consensus.  You're free to use an old/modified Squeak that
>> support underscore-assignment-rendered-as-an-arrow, but the community
>> has clearly decided otherwise (please don't make me dig for references,
>> but I will if I have to).
>>   
> This community doesn't even have a consensus on the way to make
> decisions. These are not my words, but they say what I think:
> "Historically, decisions have been made by the people screaming the
> loudest or the longest. We need to work out a way to fix this and to
> come to a process by which we can make decisions that are acceptable
> to the community at large." 

Even if that's generally true, that doesn't mean that every single
decision is made that way. 

> Only when there is a process set up to make decisions, and it is
> applied to issues like this, you can say there is consensus. This has
> not happened yet. And I do really hope it will happen this year.

That would be great.  For questions like this, it would be interesting
to try some form of direct democracy.  Perhaps for next years election,
we could have a plebiscite on some issues like this.  The whole
community could vote "yes", "no", and "don't care" to this and other
questions, and the issue would be settled once and for all.  I could be
wrong, but I think that you'd be unhappy with the result for this
particular question ;-)

>> You shouldn't muddy the waters for Squeak newcomers who haven't
>> experienced the history first-hand.  Underscore assignment is on the way
>> out.  Period.
>>   
>
> No it is not. You have no authority to say so. Perhaps the board has it. 

"Perhaps the board?"  Who else besides our elected representatives?

> But not you. I'm sorry.

It's not just me.  The 3.9 release team had the authority to say so, and
they clearly intended to move away from underscores.  Unfortunately,
there wasn't follow-through on the proposal to adopt the
#allowUnderscoreAssignments from Croquet.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-April/103210.html

Over and out,
Josh




>
>> I like the look of the left-arrow myself, but there's no reason that a
>> pretty-printer can't render it that way; unfortunately nobody has
>> stepped up to make that a reality.  On the other hand, I look forward to
>> when underscore-assignment is not only deprecated, but completely
>> disallowed, so that I can, for example, program OpenGL in Squeak using
>> identical constant names (eg: GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT instead of
>> GLColorBufferBit).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Josh
>>
>>   
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
>