Hi,
"Jecel Assumpcao Jr" <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote in message 
news:48150.8115343333$1204760955 at news.gmane.org...
> Andrew Tween wrote:
>> These assignment discussions are most amusing, and I am sure will remain 
>> so
>> for many years to come ;)
>
> Since you enjoy them, I will add a few comments. The change from left
> arrow to underscore was done when moving from the draft ASCII standard
> (1963) to the final one (1968). Unfortunately even in the early 1980s
> there was still a lot of equipment being sold compatible with the draft
> version. This was particularly true on anything from DEC or Xerox. So it
> was natural that Smalltalk-80's notion of ASCII matched Xerox's.
>
> When Digitalk released their first product in 1985 they introduced the
> ideas of ":=" for assignment. Though the PC did have a left arrow
> character, it used the exact same code as ESC and that would have caused
> a lot of confusion. In addition they were trying really hard to sell to
> Pascal programmers (C was not yet as popular at that time) with nearly
> all examples in their very nice manual including the Pascal version
> beside the Smalltalk one. Given the changes they had made they decided
> to call their product "Methods". By their second product they had
> cleared things up with Xerox and so it was caleld "Smalltalk V". This
> one was graphical and could have used anything they wanted for
> assignment, but they kept the ":=" for compatibility with their previous
> product.
>
> Of course, there is nothing wrong in letting stuff from Pascal (or C)
> creep into Smalltalk. The colon before block argument names, for
> example, came unchanged from Logo. But neither do I mind being
> different.

Thanks, the history is interesting.
I don't mind being different either. In fact, tomorrow morning, I am going 
to trade in my Ford Focus for a Ford Model T because the brake pedal should 
definitely be on the right hand side and I can't understand why they changed 
it.
 :)

>
> -- Jecel
>
>