A few wish list items

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at cs.otago.ac.nz
Thu Nov 21 02:53:20 UTC 2002


"Stephen Pair" <spair at acm.org> wrote:
	I am very fond of the arrow (and used to argue that it was an endearing
	quality of Squeak), but the reality is that it's not comfortable in the
	modern ASCII world ...

ASCII hasn't been "modern" since a few years after 1967.
Back in the mid-80s, Xerox were using a 16-bit character set.
All the arrows Squeak needs are very much part of HTML 4
(&larr; for _ and &uarr; for ^),
and you can't really pretend to handle XML without being able
to handle Unicode.

It's as simple as this:  if we ever want Scamper to render HTML 4 (which
the W3C think has long been superseded by XHTML), we need left and right
single and double quotation marks, the Euro, left right up and down single
and double arrows, and a whole bunch of other things.  There aren't any
characters Squeak needs that we don't need for HTML.

Perhaps Squeak 4.x could have 16-bit characters?
(Actually, Unicode 3.x needs 21-bit characters, but that's another longer
and in some respects story.)

Nobody has yet presented any reason why Squeak should not allow left
arrows for assignment, only why the underscore code should not be
rendered as left arrow.  If we could handle the characters named in
the HTML 4.01 specification, we could have BOTH real underscores AND
real left arrows.




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