[I'm so sorry that I coudn't resist to write a few replies to this thread. 
And yes, I read everything so far :-]

At 01:50 16.02.00 +0000, you wrote:

>Remove your 'end' statements, write 'def' where you write 'method',
>write 'health=' where you write 'health:', add colons after your if
>and else statements, and your Smatalk is legal Python.

I know.  It was my intention to make it look very similar but not identical 
to Python, actually Ruby but I don't know that language well enough yet 
that I remember details and I didn't bother to look them up for my email.

I like Python for its easy and clean language.  I don't buy the argument 
that a small sytax is automatically easy to learn or that a larger syntax 
is automatically more difficult to learn.

>The only disadvantage I see to multiple syntaxes is in books, web
>pages, mailing list messages, and newsgroup comments, where the syntax
>must be chosen by the author

Yepp, that's right.  However, instead of nearly endless (Hey, was this 
sudden email-explosion really that worse?  I think, the topic is important 
and if people stay polite I've no problem with different opinions) 
discussion we probably have to try out and test alternatives as one this 
way you can really argue about whether it was a good idea or not.

At moment however, I'd again refrain from that suggestion and so for the 
also suggested extension of the existing language with []-collection 
accessing, a few control flow keywords and perhaps the ":="-assignment 
messages. Together with Travis' idea on how to create a more concrete 
dialect of Smalltalk, this might be interesting to try out...


bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  ...dancing on the Darkside of the Moon