A still sensible question about _ and :=

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Apr 23 07:36:43 UTC 2001


Hi

I'm really wondering why Squeak code continues to have _
instead of using :=.

At the beginning I started to find _ cool but then I realized
that all the other Smalltalks use :=
(somebody here will say yes but squeak can evolve, Squeak is different....
blablabla 
Yes Squeak can evolve a lot but I'm thinking that this is not exactly the
place where I would like to see being different than the other smalltalk.)

Then this bad arrow is really annoying because depending on the fonts, the
size we use it is not a nice arrow (can it be nice) but an _.

So if we could reduce the number of non essential points that makes squeak
different from the other Smalltalks this would be great.

(I know that changing the pretty printer can change the printed version of
assignment node. 
I use it even if the way color are assigned is definitively not the right
way of doing it: recompiling a method is not a customisable solution)

Stef

I let the discussion of { . } for another email but I think from the
experience I had looking at ObjectStudio industrial application code
(ObjectStudio proposes also { } and programmer loved it to write amazingly
ugly code) that { . } is absolutely *not* a cool shortcut for dynamic array
creation. 







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