> There have been many false and downright nonsensical claims 
> made in this thread.  A factor of 10 would be one of those.  
> A factor of 2 is pretty unlikely.  In every place you find 
> lots of parens then it will be turning each pair into one 
> character.  So that sounds more like maybe a 2% reduction if 
> there are lots of parens.  If that was all there was to it.  
> But it isn't.  With this he wants to remove all kinds of 
> methods like:  #add:after: so those turn into multiple 
> statements probably more then doubling the size.  So the code 
> size will actually get larger on the whole with this change.  
> Granted I haven't ran any tests to verify this, but proof 
> would seem out of place in this thread. :)

Rather than base any counter arguments on absurd claims, just ignore the
absurd claims.  Vassili, as well as providing the initial implementation,
sums up the rational pro side quite nicely on his blog at
http://blog.3plus4.org/2007/08/30/message-chains/.  

The short of it being that logically, it seems like a decent idea, but only
time and some actual use will tell.

I image the same arguments were made when array literals were introduced,
but I'm glad they were because some things are done so often that they
should be supported syntactically.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com