Tim Rowledge wrote:
> I have this vague recollection of some keyboards not having the caret
> over the 6, which perhaps explains the slip. Or perhaps not having the
> underscore over the dash? Not sure.

The keyboard I am typing this on, which follows a standard called
ABNT-2, has the caret two keys to the right of "L" (with shift, the
unshifted character on the key is "~"). This discussion is a bit odd as
viewed in Celeste because half of the posts show arrows while the other
half show caret and underline even when one is quoting the other. Ah:
Tim's posts are windows-1252 while Frank's are UTF-8, for example.

As far as I know, the Pascal style assignment appeared in Digitalk's
Methods even though the PC CGA character set actually had a left arrow.
But the manual made it clear that the audience was Pascal programmers
and the first few examples were shown both in Pascal and Smalltalk with
an effort to show how similar things were. That was several generations
back and today's programmers only find C syntax familiar.

When using syntax coloring, the possibility of having a caret being
misinterpreted due to a missing dot is not as great as when the code is
read in plain text. I had looked into this when I came up with the idea
of having the caret be a binary selector in a simplified version of
Self. The return was no longer special syntax but just a one argument
message to implicit self. The corresponding "slot" held a continuation,
so you didn't need a return bytecode. See item 2 in:

http://www.merlintec.com/swiki/software/11.html

-- Jecel