[Cryptography Team] Removing underscores

[Ron Teitelbaum]

Thanks for the explanation!  It makes more sense now.  I noticed that in my
image aTemp_'hello' blew up but aTemp _ 'hello' didn't.  It appeared to need
a space to determine if the underscore was an assignment character.  I would
seem that the Unicode replacement of an arrow would be needed before
allowing _ since it appears to support both.

Ron

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cryptography-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> [mailto:cryptography-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of
> Hans-Martin Mosner
> Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 2:56 PM
> To: Cryptography Team Development List
> Subject: Re: [Cryptography Team] Removing underscores
> 
> 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
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