Brian Wilkerson once developed an interesting proposal for extending the
message pattern with optional keywords and a variable numbers of repeated
keywords. You can find his proposal at
http://www.smalltalksystems.com/publications/varargs.pdf

Some people seem to like this concept and other seem to not. As far as I
know nobody has every actually tried to implement it but I think both parts
of his proposal would be relatively easy to implement in Squeak primarily
with a little compiler hacking. Note that while he proposes a virtual
machine change to support the variable args I believe that it could be
prototyped strictly using #doesNotUnderstand:


Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com