Peter W. Lount wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I would like to use "_" as a normal character. I won't miss it as an
>assignment statement.

[Much combustable material snipped]

>What is needed is another character that can be generated from the keyboard
>for the left arrow assginment. But it's too late for that since other
>Smaltalks have already adopted the ":=" as the assignment character.

' a := Object new.' copyReplaceAll: ':=' with: '_'. ":)"

>I also find that a lot of people just learning Smalltalk have a difficult
>time with the return symbol "^". Maybe it should be replaced with the
>keyword "return" as in "return anObject" in place of "^anObject"? This
>would make the language a little more familar to all those crazy and wacky
>"C" and "C++" programmers out there! ;--)

We could call the new language "Java".  Or is someone using that name
already? :)

But seriously, we can have our cake and eat it too (Yay!).  No one is
probably reading this thread anymore, but did anything come of the mentions
earlier on the list about Unicode?  Now that TrueType fonts are being
integrated into Squeak perhaps those free non-Roman fonts on the internet
could be used to make Squeak truly international.  And Unicode has both the
left arrow (U+2190) and the up arrow (U+2191).  The question of which key
to press to get these characters is secondary (I vote for CTRL-ALT-DELETE
for _ )

Russell

>
>All the best,
>
>Peter W. Lount
>peter at smalltalk.org
>
>p.s. Caution while reading. This email contains highly combustable material
>that might ignite into flames. ;--)
>
>----------
>From: Dan Ingalls <DanI at wdi.disney.com>
>To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
>Subject: Re: Must _ go like the Dodo?
>Date: March 15, 1999 8:45 PM
>
>>>I think this is the way to go.  I would not try to deal with a minus sign
>>>here, but underbar should be usable when we drop the old assignment.  [I
>>>don't plan to do this until v3.0 because it implies a change of the
>>>sources].  I have been wanting dotted global names for quite a while.
>>
>> ... many near-flames snipped...
>>
>>Long live _ !
>
>Folks -
>
>I couldn't care less about _, except that I have heard a lot of reasons
>*from people on this list* for wanting to use _ as a normal character and
>not for assignment.
>
>What I said above means we won't do it right away, not we're planning to do
>it soon.  Jeesh.
>
>Was there anything else of interest in those messages?
>
>	- Dan


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Russell Allen

russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

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