Quoting Alan Kay <alan.kay at squeakland.org>:

> Hi Folks --
> 
> Damien is asking very reasonable questions, and I don't think that 
> work-around answers are in the spirit of his questions. The Smalltalk 
> ancestors of Smalltalk-80 had better answers to both of these, which 
> were inspired by similar practices in both Lisp and APL.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> 
Alan-

It would have been nice for you to actually tell us what those answers are, 
rather than titillating us ;-).  

While I have followed Smalltalk for years, I have only recently started a 
project where I need to use it.  I have found it rather frustrating in that,  
while I can discover the answers by rooting through the classes, it is not 
easy.  I, too, was surprised that I could not do things with collections, but 
rather had to use a subclass.  The adding a character problem cropped up very 
early in my explorations, and all the solutions seemed to be excessively 
wordy.  

I expect part of my problem is unfamiliarity with the (vast) set of tools 
available to discover the needed methods.  However, this is part of the large 
learning curve of Smalltalk that people complain about.   

Actually, if someone could remind me of how to find a method by my giving an 
example --- 1 ? 1 -> 2 .  I know this exists, but have no idea where to find 
it, not documentation on it.  

Thanks,
David