Well, the obvious reason why it's remained for so long would be that the
primitive number is part of the compiled method header - but why not
give it a name anyway? Possibly because even in the Blue Book primitive
specs a single primitive will often be used in several classes and
methods (sometimes with a variable number of arguments -- naughty, yes)
- see
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_chapter29.html
.

BTW, we should have all named primitives soon - if not in the final 2.8,
then for 2.9.

-- Dwight

Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> 
> I'm interested in the historical reasons, but also in why they should
> persist.
> It would be cool to do implementorsOf when reading a primitive.
> Seems to me <primitiveAdd> is better than <primitive: 1>.
> 
> After all, we want to make more VM hackers, don't we?
> 
> Daniel