If I understand the footnote in the GNU Smalltalk syntax on := and _ correctly, no Unicode is required anyway:
The GNU smalltalk manual says: " In the ancient days (like the middle 70’s), the ASCII underscore character was also printed as a back-arrow, and many terminals would display it that way, thus its current usage. " So it would be sufficient to find a font that displays _ as back-arrow, which according to the above would exist for simple ASCII -- without Unicode extensions. There are footnotes in the wikipedia page on ASCII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-Haynes_2015-60 that up arrow and left arrow were in use. It says: "By 1967 the underscore had spread to ASCII,[5] replacing the similarly-shaped left-arrow character" ----- Op 10 jan 2021 om 20:57 schreef stes s...@telenet.be: > It's not by the way that I'm sure I'd really like that feature for GNU > smalltalk, > if it would exist at all, where a Unicode character would be used for the > left-arrow. > > The idea of GNU Smalltalk is to use a UNIX command-line style environment, > and use "Emacs" (editor) and so on ... it's not about emulating the more > graphically oriented > development environment of older Smalltalk implementations. > > So by default it is logical that GNU smalltalk limits itself to strict ASCII > characters. > > Using '_' is just fine as it currently is : > > https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Syntax.html > > in the footnote it describes '_'. > > ----- Op 10 jan 2021 om 20:35 schreef stes s...@telenet.be: > >> This begs the question (I don't know the answer) whether with Unicode >> characters, >> GNU smalltalk and fonts for a Linux/Unix terminal could be made to print >> up-arrow and left-arrow, >> for GNU smalltalk ... >> >> Is there a way to do this ? There are fonts that have those characters, so > > perhaps somebody managed to do this.
