5 ms·
Squeak used to use a font which had a left-arrow glyph where underscore would normally be.
by radiowave 8y ago
Squeak used to use a font which had a left-arrow glyph where underscore would normally be.
- jecel 8y agoThe first ASCII draft (1963) had a left arrow and a right arrow which were later replaced by _ and ^. When Smalltalk-80 was developed, it replaced its non standard character set with ASCII but Xerox (like a few other companies) used the older version and that is what got adopted and which Squeak inherited. Smalltalk V was developed on the PC and borrowed := from Pascal to represent assignment supposing that most of its new users would be coming from that language. This became an option for Squeak/Pharo and since using this would free the underscore (with the proper fonts) for names imported from other languages there has been a lot of pressure to rewrite all old code to eliminate the left arrow.
- jecel 8y agoOoops - I meant that left and up arrows were replaced by _ and ^. The up arrow was used to indicate return and Smalltalk V used the caret (^) for that, which was a reasonable approximation.