Use of Underscores

John Dougan jdougan at acm.org
Sat Aug 24 06:28:35 UTC 2002


What I'd love to have is Unicode support so I could use it's math and 
greek characters in my code.  For the old pre Smalltalk-80 characters we 
could apply for a Unicode block, or just use the private space.

Interestingly, looking in VW 5i.4 I've found that there is some support 
for the Unicode up arrow (ctrl-q ^ |) and left arrow  (ctrl-q < -) 
characters in the parser and compiler that can be made to work with a 
little effort, unfortunately they currently display as a black block.

--john

Stephen Pair wrote:

>This brings up another issue (of much controversy)...should underscore
>be dropped as the assignment operator?
>
>A few years ago I argued against dropping it because it was something
>that made Squeak distinctive...but recently, having to work in multiple
>Smalltalk dialects, I've started using := routinely...it's just too
>frustrating to go back and forth.
>
>So, now I'd say let's adopt a more standard type face that agrees with
>the rest of the world for our fonts, and switch to := for assignment.
>Either that, or we should come up with a Squeak keyboard that has keys
>on it for assignment and return.  Either way, I think using keyboards
>designed for a different character set than we have in Squeak is not
>good.  Either the keyboards need to change, or the character set we're
>using needs to change.
>
>Just MHO.
>
>- Stephen
>




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