On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:59:04 +0100, Andreas Nilsson <wahboh at mac.com> wrote:

> I'd say there's a difference between:
> caveman light: fire with: flintAndTinder usingForFuel: twigsAndStraw
>
> and:
> caveman light fire with flintAndTinder usingForFuel twigsAndStraw
>
> The first example is calling a method with arguments to tell it what to  
> do while the second simply calls the methods twigsAndStraw,  
> usingForFuel, flintAndTinder, with, fire and light on the caveman object.
> You could, I suppose, write classes that has methods instead of  
> arguments and rely on people calling them in the right order but I  
> wouldn't recommend it.
>
> The second example could also be used like this:
> caveman flindAndTinder twigsAndStraw usingForFuel with fire light

Well, as I said, it was a conceptual (perceptual? habitual?) issue. I  
don't think of terms in consecutive statements--a hold over from more  
procedural langugaes, so I'd "intuit" a special punctuation for multiple  
sends. In other words, in Smalltalk, you'd send three messages with one  
parm each as:

Caveman find: flint gather: twigs light:fire.

whereas, I would expect punctuation for the separation versus for the  
parameters:

Caveman find flint, gather twigs, light fire. "Three messages, one parm  
each."

I can't defend my expectations. Just trying to become aware of them.