As observation..

This discussion is a good example of purists who throwing away 

any new ideas just because they 'don't follow standard' or 

'can be done with current syntax'.

Honestly I see no harm in adding a pipe '|' symbol as a 

special syntax symbol, like cascade ';' or period '.'

A pipe is like continuation which simply does: evaluate 

expression to the left, then continue evaluation with 

expression to the right, taking left result as receiver.

We need only minor changes to parser to add this syntax 

sugar, and no changes in complier because it don't breaks old 

syntax or message passing semantics.

It's a good idea, the pipe, but not necessarily a well thought through

implementation.  As Tim and Has point out, | is already used in several

places in the image and using it for special syntax for the pipe would cause

problems with existing code.  As Hans mentions, there's also the issue of

portability to other dialects.

Fabio's proposal to hijack ; for a pipe operator is obviously a non starter,

he clearly doesn't understand how much Smalltalk code relies on ;.

The way to get past the purists isn't by argument, it's by showing them an

implementation that works, and addresses their concerns.  A working

implementation is the difference between some who's serious about an idea

and someone who's just complaining. 

It's easy to point at the old timers

and blame them for blocking progress, it's much harder to do something that

would actually be considered progress.