Marcel, David,
It is quite easy to imagine
Imagination is one thing...experience another. Somehow, this reminds me of all the awful things that people (strongly) advocating mandatory static+manifest typing keep telling Smalltalkers will happen, which Smalltalkers just don't seem to see happening. Show me some evidence that this actually *does* happen in real life
That was exactly the question I raised to begin with. Nevin's paper quotes a few problems that don't apply to Smalltalk (like auto-coercing nil into different atomic types on varying platforms) and I was really wondering how much of a problem the message eating behavior can cause in practice. I guess there are always a lot of theoretical arguments that can be made here (similarly to the issue of static typing) and only time and experience can tell what works and what doesn't.
Cheers, - Andreas