Hello Alan,

I really enjoy when you tell us these 'histories', they help me to get a context.

[snip]
>And
>
>       'a <+ 5
>
>meant send the message "<+ 5" to "a", and the conventional meaning of 
>this was to increment the value associated with "a" by 5. Etc.

The implementation of <+ in variable class send the message + to the object holded?

>This is just to point out that full objectification of Smalltalk will 
>lead to reasonable readings of what Andreas has added.

What do you think of the SELF way to handle assignments?

>Since a fair amount of my original motivation in trying to invent an 
>OOP language in the late sixties was to get rid of assignment as an 
>operation and turn it into just another message, it is ironic that 
>the later Smalltalks didn't pay as much attention to this as they 
>probably should have. Smalltalk-76 had a better syntax than -80 for 
>dealing with some of the overloading, but still didn't really 
>materialize variables or bindings as classes with real objects. The 
>at-put conventions of -80 are particularly annoying to me.
>      (Most of these choices were for reasons of efficiency, but I 
>think the later work of SELF and the MOP show that it is better to 
>have a really clean general semantics with a fully objectified 
>metamodel, and then use (automatic) compilation to get efficiency.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan

Thanks,

Diego Gomez Deck