Hello Smalltalkers,
I was interacting the other day with an user in a Scala mailing list, and he had some questions about Smalltalk. From his FP (functional programming) point of view there were some things that looked strange. I tried to reply to the best of my ability, but still I don't really know the background for these design decisions. So I come to you, real experts, hoping for some answers.
The questions were:
1) Why do ST methods return "self" if nothing is explicitly returned? (he would have expected something like "Unit" in Scala, or "Void" - which I know makes little sense in a world like ST's, so I didn't include this in the Stackoverflow question)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14047887/why-do-methods-return-self-by-de...
2) In Collections, why does "add:" return the object being added, and not "self"?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14047940/why-does-add-return-the-object-a...
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The original interaction in the Scala mailing list (nice language, by the way) was here:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/scala-user/gPEJNAEZO-8/discussion
Thanks a lot in advance!
Sebastian