I'm for having underscores in selectors, and a preference seems like a 
simple enough solution

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010, Torsten Bergmann wrote:

> Until now we have:
>
> PRO
> - Torsten
> - Edgar
> - Bert
> - Alexander
> - Matthew
> - Keith
> - Igor
>
> CONTRA
> - Ian Trudel
> - Sam
>
> SCOPING
> - Andreas (but vote PRO depend on backwards compatibility aspect)
> - Stéphane (votes for scoping)
>
> NOT CLEARLY STATED
> - Louis
> - Randal (vote seem to depend on Preference, which we now have)
> - Radoslav (but would rather ban underscore assignment, than
>             underscores in method names)
> - Ralph Boland
> - Nicolas
>
>> There's a lot of code that uses at least x_ foo (i.e., no space between >var name and underscore).
>
> With the Preference disabled you have Squeak as it was before and
> there should be no problem to load this code. At least if you dont
> have packages with "_" selectors. And if thats not enough a simple
> lint rule can check that _ selectors are not used in a base/core image.
>
> I dont know about the Etoys codebase that much but is it really relying
> on the missing space here?
>
> If not the code can be automatically converted while loading as Matthew
> suggested in [1] today. An alternative would be to do the homework
> (as with other stuff like #fixTemps and friends) and update the
> code when moving to newer Squeak?!
>
> The Refactoring browser also has a nice function to convert _ to := assignments (in the lint tool).
>
>
>> I'm wondering: I don't really know how the people who want underscores
>> plan to use this, but would it make sense to scope this differently,
>> i.e., either on a per-class or even a per-method basis?
>
> Scoping? Why? A preference is
>  a) simple
>  b) settable by the image owner who is able to decide if he
>     wants to allow it or not (same as with underscores)
>
>> Per class would be my favorite because in a system where you'd like to
>> use underscores globally you'd just have Object
>> class>>allowUnderscoreSelectors return true.
>
> You mean this for real? I thought we would clean up the system
> instead of putting anything into (already bloated) base classes .... ;)
>
> And is it a class who allows underscore selectors or is it the compiler?
>
> Bye
> Torsten
>
> [1] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-March/146419.html
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