Esthetically I would like to see assignment *displayed* as a 
left-arrow.  This is the original Smalltalk usage, and I think it is 
elegant.  Just because technology limits this use, is not a reason to 
reject it or prevent it.  However, we should support ANSI standards.  
Therefore, this should be made a preference, defaulting to ANSI.  I 
think the argument it is more similar to other languages is a non-starter. 

Practically, more than one form of entry should be acceptable, and again 
should be included in the preferences.  Whether this be in an editor, or 
in the parser is arguable and good arguments have been made.  Underline 
should probably be defaulted off, to allow the use in file names, etc. 

As for off line storage of code, I would agree that we should support 
ANSI standard, as it would allow the greatest reuse in different 
Smalltalks. 

David



Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:

>Duncan Mak wrote on Thu, 8 Jun 2006 11:40:01 -0400
>  
>
>>I'm surprised that no one mentioned it, but for me, a big reason why I missed
>>having the good ol' left arrow is because := just takes so many keys to type. 
>>    
>>
>
>Exactly - there are two entirely separate issues relating to the
>assignment character: how to type it and how it is displayed by the
>various hardware/software combinations.
>
>I would just like to take a small detour into the history of character
>sets for those who keep complaining that Squeak "hijacked" the underline
>character. As we can see in
>http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/stand.html there was no
>underline character in the 1963 proposal for ASCII. In 1965 the up and
>left arrows were replaced by the now familiar caret and underline
>characters, but by then the uppercase-only older version was already in
>use in printers and popular teletype terminals. It is easy to say that
>when Xerox PARC was founded this was already ancient history and they
>should have adopted the final version of ASCII but things don't easily
>change that fast - at the computer center where I worked in 1982 all our
>teletypes still had no lowercase, caret nor underline characters. And
>this is why we call a method #helpWithTopic: instead of
>#help_with_topic: like many other languages.
>
>It is interesting that the original IBM PC video hardware did include
>characters for all four arrows, with 16r18 as the up arrow and 16r1B as
>the left arrow. So when Digitalk introduced their Methods text based
>system in 1985 they could have used these. But they would have been very
>awkward to type (specially with the left arrow having the same character
>code as ESC) and since their target audience was Pascal programmers (all
>examples in the first part of their manual include the Pascal equivalent
>of the Smalltalk code) they decided to change the assignment to
>something that would be more familiar to them and would look good when
>printed on the ASCII dot matrix printers of the time.
>
>Now we have Unicode and several nice arrows to choose from while letting
>the underline be just an underline. Certainly it is far from trivial to
>make this change without messing up old code but I think it would be
>worth the effort. But even if this is done there still wouldn't be a
>good way to type in these characters, so Duncan's proposed patch would
>be very important.
>
>-- Jecel
>
>
>
>  
>