Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

>> Let us not lose sight of the fact that Smalltalk (like Pascal) originally
>> didn't include low lines because it simply _couldn't_; the first version
>> of ASCII just plain didn't include them.
> 
> Really?
> Yes.
> 
> This is historically correct?
> Yes.
> 
> With all the wierd glyphs, I'm surprised.  Can you give a source

This is historically wrong. (See eg. "The early history of Smalltalk".)
Smalltalk did not adopt ascii until ST-80. Before this they used their own
set, including "eyes" and smiley faces in ST-72. Hence, they could obviously
use whatever they wanted. A look at some ST-76 code shows that the
intercappedStyle was used already then, and so obviously by preference.
While many of the convenient characters had to be dropped for ascii
compliance, underscore wasn't used even before that.

I think it is a definite possibilty that underscores came to be used because
there were no lowercase characters avaiable, only uppercase. (Lowercase?
Luxury.)

> Aesthetic grounds are inadequate grounds for making engineering decisions.

And engineering grounds are inadequate for making aesthetic decisions.


Now if we could only discuss something less controversial, like whether
Jesus was actually a homosexual, or whether Mary Magdalene was really his
wife rather than a prostitue--to take two current debates in the media.

Henrik