Michael said &lt;&lt;<br><br>Hi Andy,<br>
<br>
why would the message have to be binary anyway? If you want the k-th<br>
Fibonacci number, why don&#39;t you just send #fib to k?<br>
<br>
Regarding symbols vs. not symbols: all selectors are symbols,<br>
internally. I might get something in your e-mail wrong - could you<br>
restate the question?<br>
<br>&gt;&gt;<br>
<br>Hi Michael<br>Thanks very much for your thoughts. Let me try to explain myself, slightly more clearly!<br><br>First, this was just an experiment. I was reading a book on Python, saw how they did it, and thought I would try in Squeak. So, I hadn&#39;t really thought about how I was going to use it.  I like your suggestion about implementing is as:  anInteger #fib.  However, thinking about implementing it as a binary message made me curious about why I couldn&#39;t do that.<br>
<br>The specific problem I am having is:<br>If I define an Integer method such as<br><br>&lt;&lt;&lt;*** aNumber<br><br>Squeak is quite happy to let me create it.  However, if I do something like    fib aNumber, the compiler complains that aNumber is a unknown variable, which I need to define.  So, what I was really trying to understand was what it was about the e.g. &lt;&lt;&lt; symbol which allowed it to have an undeclared argument.<br>
<br>I think that, based on your last message, it is just that &lt;&lt;&lt; etc have been defined as special characters. Is that correct?<br><br>Cheers<br>Andy<br>