Brian Keefer <mgomes21 at cox.net> wrote:
	What is the history behind Squeak's use of _ ?

It goes back to the very earliest days of Smalltalk.
The character set that Xerox used on the Alto was NOT ASCII as we know it
(which is ASCII 67) nor yet was it the previous version of ASCII (ASCII 63).
It was a sort of hybrid.  Imagine a model 33 teletype with lower case.
[If you look at the history of ASCII, it's quite obvious in ASCII 63
that they were leaving space for lower case.  It just wasn't official.
So Smalltalk used ASCII 63.1, I guess you could say.]

One of the things that changed between ASCII 63 and ASCII 67 was that
the left arrow and up arrow characters were replaced by "low line" and
"accent circumflex".  (Why do some BASICs use ^ for raisedTo:?  Because
in the old days it was up arrow, and so made immediate visual sense.)

Why did Smalltalk end up with a baStudlyCaps naming style?
Because that was ALL that you could do to indicate word breaks;
no obvious 'break' character was available.

This history also explains how come the curly braces were still free
for Squeak to redefine.