Case sensitive and ludicrous statements

[Mark Jackson]

"Cy Edmunds" <cedmunds at spamless.rochester.rr.com> writes:
> "Mark Jackson" <mjackson at alumni.caltech.edu> wrote in message
> news:br0m9h$qn2$1 at news.wrc.xerox.com...

> > Re. CamelCase and SmallTalk:  ISTR that the Alto keyboard lacked an
> > underscore character (I believe the character code was used for
> > left-arrow, which I vaguely recall was used for assignment in BCPL
> > and/or Mesa).  As constructions like foo_bar are the obvious
> > alternative to FooBar, could this lack have been a factor at PARC?

> You're right Mark. Mesa mapped the underscore to left arrow, which was used
> for assignment. I suppose this was an improvement over Pascal's := except
> that ItMadeYouWriteLikeThis.

[Good morning, Cy.  Bridge?]

And I see by the Smalltalk-80 book I have here that Smalltalk makes use
of the left arrow as well.

This all suggests that the "standard PARC character set" lacked the
underscore.  (As far as I can tell the only other variation from
standard ASCII was the replacement of the carat "^" with an up-arrow.)
I wonder how far back that goes - the Nova-based POLOS system?  MAXC?

-- 
Mark Jackson - http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~mjackson
	Logic doesn't apply to the real world.	- Marvin Minsky