Re: display _ as left arrow (was Re: Help on sending a UDP Packet)

[Derek Zhou]

stes@PANDORA.BE writes:

> If I understand the footnote in the GNU Smalltalk syntax on := and _ 
> correctly, no Unicode is required anyway:
>
> The GNU smalltalk manual says:
> " In the ancient days (like the middle 70’s), the ASCII underscore character 
> was also printed as a back-arrow, and many terminals would display it that 
> way, thus its current usage. "
>
> So it would be sufficient to find a font that displays _ as back-arrow,
> which according to the above would exist for simple ASCII -- without Unicode 
> extensions.
>
> There are footnotes in the wikipedia page on ASCII
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-Haynes_2015-60
>
> that up arrow and left arrow were in use.
>
> It says:
> "By 1967 the underscore had spread to ASCII,[5] replacing the 
> similarly-shaped left-arrow character"
With the newer smalltalk-mode from elpa, and if you enable
prettify-symbols-mode in emacs, you will get the prettified unicode
symbols. Currently there are only two that are defined: 

(defvar smalltalk-prettify-symbols-alist
  '(("^" . ?↑)
    (":=" . ?←)))

Please note you cannot use the fancy symbols in source code though;
it is only emacs tricking your eyes at display.

Derek