Without committing to your proposal (steps 4 and 5 are significant and not without side-effects), I have one related suggestion:

A possible simplification would be to use '<-' (the same two characters everyone uses in email) as the internal alternate to :=.  This would end all font concerns, and thus eliminate steps 1 and 3 of your proposal.

It's possible some apps already use '<-' as a binary operator.  That could be a problem.

Except for that possible problem, it's probably easier to make compatibility packages for other ST's to allow '<-' than to do steps 4 and 5 for Squeak.  (Squeak meets ANSI ;-).

	- Dan
----------------------------
>I think that we should
>
>(1) move the arrow glyph to an unused location in the character set 
>(there are lots of them, lets say Character value: 31 as a concrete 
>suggestion).
>
>(2) Put underscore back in its proper place.
>
>(3) Fix the fonts so that the arrow glyph actually prints as an arrow 
>glyph in all sizes, and underscore prints as an underscore.  This 
>probably requires some trickery in the font import stuff; I'm 
>waffling here because I know nothing about it.
>
>(4) Change the fileout code so that := is always used.
>
>(5) Possibly, add preferences to the prettyprinter and the compiler 
>so that users can look at whichever of := or arrow they prefer.  (I 
>strongly prefer arrow, by the way, but that is not the point.)
>
>(6) Possibly, add preferences so that one can have the _ key insert 
>an arrow, as now, and <ctrl -> inserts a _, or vice versa.  Or 
>ctrl-g.  Or whatever.  We can all do our own customization on that 
>one, I would guess.
>
>What are the benefits of all of this work?  (The work is in making 
>the change happen without us all having to "get off the bus"). Quite 
>a number, actually.
>
>First, file names and text files containing _ will print correctly 
>inside Squeak.  Second, Squeak fileouts that I include in email and 
>on web pages will print correctly, without my painstakingly having to 
>replace all of the _ with little arrow.gif pictures!  Third, we will 
>be able to interchange code with other Smalltalks more easily -- at 
>least they would be able to file Squeak in and massage it into a 
>working state.  Fourth, when I make the font size larger to give a 
>demo, the code will still have arrows in it on the screen, not 
>underscores, which are pretty hard to explain to a not always 
>sympathetic audience.
>
>I think that appearances are important, and this has been bugging me recently.
>
>	Andrew