>>>>> "MJR" == Mark J Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
MJR> On 2003-01-21 at 11:09:21, Thom Boyer wrote:
>> One of the most... er, *interesting*, dodges I've seen in this area
>> is the one used by Squeak (a Smalltalk variant). Squeak spells
>> assignment with an underscore ("_"), but the Squeak system *draws*
>> it as a left-pointing arrow.
MJR> There's a history behind that particular choice; before the ISO-8859
MJR> standardization, people got the characters they needed by making
MJR> "mostly-ASCII" character sets that differed in small ways from the
MJR> original US standard. Having a left-pointing arrow in place of the
MJR> underscore was a common variant (used in, for instance, PET ASCII
MJR> on Commodore computers, which also had other substitutions, such
MJR> as the letter pi in place of tilde, and the British pound symbol
MJR> in place of backslash).
<- instead of underscore goes way back. the teletype (ASR33 and friends)
had <- on the keyboard and the print head.
MJR> Assignment has been written as a left arrow in pseudocode for
MJR> decades, but because the character was left out of ASCII (although
MJR> it's in EBCDIC), its use within actual languages has been pretty
it wasn't left out but the graphic morphed to underscore sometime in the
70's. the vt52, decterminals and such came out then and had underscore
instead of <-. the ascii code stayed the same.
uri
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