Due to PARC's using the 1963 variant of ASCII rather than the more common 1967 variant, the Alto's character set included a left-pointing arrow (←) rather than an underscore. The result of this is that Alto programmers (including those using Mesa, Smalltalk etc.) conventionally used camelCase for compound identifiers, a practice which was incorporated in PARC's standard programming style. On the other hand, the availability of the left-pointing arrow allowed them to use it for the assignment operator, as it originally had been in ALGOL.
Due to PARC's using the 1963 variant of ASCII rather than the more common 1967 variant, the Alto's character set included a left-pointing arrow (←) rather than an .underscore. The result of this is that Alto programmers (including those using Mesa, Smalltalk etc.) conventionally used camelCase for compound identifiers, a practice which was incorporated in PARC's standard programming style On the other hand, the availability of the left-pointing arrow allowed them to use it for the assignment operator, as it originally had been in ALGOL.