In Smalltalk-72 and -74 the assignment (left arrow character) was a message just like any other. This became a special case in Smalltalk-76 and later and became

In Smalltalk-72 and -74 the assignment (left arrow character) was a message just like any other. This became a special case in Smalltalk-76 and later and became just a message again in Self, where you wrote i: (j + 1) meaning self i: ( self j + 1 ) For tinySelf 1 I did implement each message using future objects. This is, as you say, slooooow to do for every piece of computation but there are implementation tricks that can optimize away all the cases where it is not really needed. http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/tiny.html http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/tiny.html