On 08.03.2006, at 09:38, Dan Corneanu wrote:

> Marcus Denker wrote:
>
>>
>> Before 3.9 goes beta, we will have relaced all the _ by :=, and
>> everything will be fine.
>>
>>       Marcus
>>
> What happend with '<-' ? I kind of liked it more than ':=' or '_'.
>

There is no backarrow on my keyboard, and there is no backarrow
in the ASCII font. Especially, it is *extremely* strange to just co-opt
the underscore. What if I want to use an underscore? What
about copy and paste? Ever tried to read an email containing Squeak
code?

So the re-defined _ was clearly a bug, and thus we fixed it.

Now _ looks very strange for assignment, so it's better to use :=.

Another reason: Most changesets that I integrated came with :=
over the last years, as people use Shout which silently replaces
_ with := by default, or use Squeak's pretty printer which printed
:= by default, too.

Now all this does not mean that I think that ASCII is the best
way to display code. But if we want to move forward on that
regard, let's do it for real, not with this strange _ thing.

I for one would like to have a system that does not save text
at all but has a higher-level representation and a very powerful
pretty-printer.

        Marcus