On Nov 14, 2009, at 4:38 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
> I feel somewhat responsible for this branch of the thread :( For the record,
> I am freely willing to "give up" underscore assignment. The idea of allowing
> it via a whitespace trick seemed worthy of due consideration, but I am liking
> it less as the debate continues.
>
> IIRC, the whole mess got started over a desire to have a single keypress for
> assignment. Sadly, I was not consulted, because that could have been
> accomplished as an optional feature of the editor (_ inserts :=, backing up
> over = removes a preceding :, turn it off if you want no part of it; done),
> but it was instead allowed to seep into the compiler and the sources.
>
No, the _ used to be rendered as a left-arrow. This comes from a time far, far
away when there where less standards...build-your-own keyboad times.
It was a left-over from Smalltalk 72 which had lots of graphical characters as
part of the language.
The _ was removed from all Smalltalks, just not from Squeak. This was because
it felt to certain people that going ascii was a mistake anyway
and that more graphical stuff should come again, not less. And removing the
left-arrow betrays that vision.
The fun thing is: I am all for experiments to go beyond text. But than it
should be *real*. Just keeping the _ as a kind of "look, we are special"
is idiotic. So we removed the funny character left-arrow and let it render what
the _ (so people can deal with external code, c, or database rows...).
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker -- [email protected]
http://www.marcusdenker.de
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