[Newbies] What does the -> symbol mean?

[Benjamin Schroeder]

On Jul 29, 2008, at 8:02 PM, Andy Burnett wrote:

> I can't find it in my introductory books. The content was:
>
> self entries add: aString -> aBlock
>
> Is it a bit like the underscore character being the same as :=  ?

It's actually a binary (one-argument, infix) method, like +, =, or ==;  
it's the - and > characters put together rather than being a  
specialized glyph like the left arrow was. It creates an Association,  
which is a key-value pair used in things like Dictionaries.

If I remember correctly, any characters which can be used for binary  
methods can be strung together to make other binary methods -  
sometimes you'll see these turn up in specialized contexts. For  
example, there's also ==>, on Booleans, for implication ("a implies b").

Ben Schroeder