[Cryptography Team] Removing underscores

[Hans-Martin Mosner]

Ron Teitelbaum schrieb:
> I agree.  The names of the classes do come directly from the protocol, but
> their value is arguable.  I agree with Bill though that interfaces to DB's
> is a good example of where underscores should be allowed.  I really don't
> understand the argument for not allowing them, or the argument that they are
> aesthetically displeasing.  They seem reasonable to me.
>   
Original Smalltalk-80 had a left-arrow glyph at character code 16r5F
where ASCII has the underscore.
In my opinion it was an unfortunate choice, but IIRC the development of
ASCII and of Smalltalk somewhat overlapped in time, and at one point in
time the ASCII precursor had left arrow and up arrow at the position
where Smalltalk-80 used them for the assignment and return symbols.
When I came to learn Smalltalk, I found the Smalltalk style of
EmbeddedCaps much more visually pleasing than the style of
ALL_UPPERCASE_LETTERS_WITH_UNDERSCORES which was prevalent in most
programming languages at the time, but this was probably more due to the
uppercase letters than the underscores.
Nowadays, with Unicode as the character encoding of choice, there's not
much reason left to disallow the underscore in identifiers, except the
backwards compatibility argument. But I'm fairly sure that the Squeak
community will burn that bridge one day - it might just not be tomorrow.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin