[Newbies] Two questions about Smalltalk language design

[Sebastian Nozzi]

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-default-in-smalltalk

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-added-in-smalltalk-collections

----

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