On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Colin Putney wrote:

> Bizarre. When I read Lisp or Scheme I find myself counting parenthesis
> a lot, but Smalltalk seems to have no syntax at all - just message
> sends. Good on you for sticking with it.

Funny, my own Smalltalk code looks really Lispish, in that I parenthesize
_everything_. :)

When I see a line like,

aaron consume: coffee + donuts,

I know intellectually that the binary send takes precedence. But the colon
in the keyword looks so powerful and catches my eye so strongly that my
guts want to parse it as

(aaron consume: coffee) + donuts, which adds my caffinated self to a
donut, which is weird (and of course incorrect.)

For me to see the structure, in my own code I write

aaron consume: (coffee + donuts),

The parens are redundant, and will instantly identify me as a novice
Smalltalker. But I need them in order to not get confused. The colon
stands out so much that my brain wants to give it precedence it doesn't
have.

I think that's the main thing that gives me trouble. (This started to take
shape in my brain when I was responding to Andreas off-list).

- Aaron

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