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From: doug@hcr.UUCP (Doug Moen)
Newsgroups: net.lang.st80
Subject: Re: binary message question
Message-ID: <566@hcr.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 14-Jan-84 00:25:57 EST
Article-I.D.: hcr.566
Posted: Sat Jan 14 00:25:57 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Jan-84 00:58:36 EST
References: <7166@arizona.UUCP>
Organization: Human Computing Resources, Toronto
Lines: 17

Binary messages are provided in St-80 purely as a matter of "syntactic sugar".
It's more convenient to type
	a * b + c
than
	(a times: b) plus: c

The current scheme of having 3 classes of messages, each with a different
syntax, was actually introduced in Smalltalk-76.  I've been told that,
at the time, Alan Kay claimed that this was only a temporary measure,
until they could come up with a more elegant syntax.

Prior to this (in Smalltalk 72), messages were effectively free-format.
A message could be defined as any sequence of parameters and selectors.
The catch was that messages had to be parsed at run-time, by code in
the class definition.  Although this was supremely flexible, it slowed
things down, and worse, led to hard-to-read code, and strange bugs,
when an expression was parsed in a manner unintended by the programmer.