Hi guys we are looking at STON and ObjectLiterals with Christophe and for handling metadata. And I was brainstorming.... I was wondering if it would be possible to have a bit more use of self evaluating for example 1@3 #k -> 2 instead of (Association #k 123) my brainstorming is how could we minimize new syntactic constructs and still support a literal object format. So object literal cover that so may be this is good. 1@3 as (Point 1 3) and #k -> 123 as (Association #k 123) So I'm not clear but this is interesting to think about it. I would like to have also a dictionary literal syntax.... but this another story. Stef PS: Sven I added support for Association into the ObjectLiteral project to see how it works. I took Igor's initial code and created a new project: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~SvenVanCaekenberghe/ObjectLiterals/ and I added ObjectLiteralParser to convert any Character Stream or String into a Smalltalk Literal Array and eventually into an Object. This proof of concept moves the ObjectLiteral format/notation away from the Smalltalk compiler and will help us discuss more concretely the actual details of the specification (which is still not 100% finished). I also added 12 unit tests and cleaned up the code and comments. Please have a look at the code. This is one of the tests: ObjectLiteralParserTests>>#testMixed1 | input output | input := ' #(Array 1 foo #''foo-#bar'' true false nil 3.14159 -100 ''string'' (#OrderedCollection 7 8 9) #(Set 10) (Dictionary x 1 y 2) ) '. output := { 1. #foo. #'foo-#bar'. true. false. nil. 3.14159. -100. 'string'. OrderedCollection withAll: #(7 8 9). Set with: 10. Dictionary newFromPairs: #(x 1 y 2 ). }. self assert: (self parserOn: input) nextObjectLiteral equals: output I like this format, its simplicity and elegance is appealing, it offers distinctive advantages in the Smalltalk context while its slight readability disadvantage is acceptable. Like any format it is a compromise and a tradeoff, but a rather good one. Regards, Sven -- Sven Van Caekenberghe http://stfx.eu Smalltalk is the Red Pill