On Dec 4, 2003, at 4:52 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
Lots of appearance things were nicer before the Smalltalk-80 release efforts. I wasn't there at the time, but I think they decided (probably rightly) to use the existing character set in the outside world. And, today, it would be nice to do something like your suggestion (maybe a different one) and many other cosmetic possibilities, but several folks have pointed out that even a slight deviation from unadorned text is not supported by all email clients (sigh).
We could still use styled text within Squeak, and have conventions for writing code in plain text when necessary. For example, I always write := instead of _ when sending email, even though I much prefer the left arrow where it's supported.