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