I'm quite interested in the underscore topic but sometimes challenged to follow some of the discussions when the underscore character literally used in the discussion.
 
   print _ as _
 
 is actually not such a bad example because I was able to figure out what Marcus meant.  But there were some really bad ones in prior discussions that ended up being completely ambiguous.  Some might be reading in Squeak, for example, so you can't know what they're seeing, maybe:
 
   print <- as <-
 
 (note <- is a crude left arrow in this plain ascii email).
 
 When discussing underscore assignment, may we all make extra effort to be very clear; one suggestion would be to simply spell it out, "underscore" and "left-arrow"..
 
 Thanks..
 

----- Original Message ----
From: Marcus Denker <denker at iam.unibe.ch>
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 10:24:13 AM
Subject: Re: Loading code containing underscore assignments using Monticello


On 26.04.2006, at 16:58, Chris Becker wrote:

> Ah, so the "Underscore conversion in 3.9" thread doesn't refer to
> changes being incorporated into Squeak 3.9. OK, thank you for
> clearing that up for me Marcus.

Yes, it does. But there are multiple steps:

1) print _ as _
2) now the code in the image looks bad --> needs to be converted to :=

Both are planned for 3.9a. (that is, 1) is done, 2) not yet completed).

but then:

3) now that there is only := in the image, can we get rid of _ as an
assigment character?

This we have not yet discussed, and it is *not* planned for 3.9. And
it needs some thought,
because it brakes loading old code. So we would need tool support for
that.

       Marcus