> 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 '_'.
BTW. Currently `smalltalk-mode` in Emacs can display the `^` and the `:=` operators as up/left arrows if you activate the `prettify-symbols-mode`. It'd be trivial to add `_` to that with the patch below. The downside is that then both `_` and `:=` would be displayed in the same way. And since GNU Smalltalk seems to encourage the use of `:=` over `_`, maybe it's better to keep `_` ugly? Stefan diff --git a/smalltalk-mode.el b/smalltalk-mode.el index f662fe1d69..768396b71b 100644 --- a/smalltalk-mode.el +++ b/smalltalk-mode.el @@ -534,6 +534,7 @@ of the line where the search succeeded. Otherwise, return nil." (defvar smalltalk-prettify-symbols-alist '(("^" . ?↑) + ("_" . ?←) (":=" . ?←))) ;;;; ---[ Interactive functions ]---------------------------------------