Hello Smalltalkers, I was interacting the other day with an user in a Scala mailing list, and he had some questions about Smalltalk. From his FP (functional programming) point of view there were some things that looked strange. I tried to reply to the best of my ability, but still I don't really know the background for these design decisions. So I come to you, real experts, hoping for some answers. The questions were: 1) Why do ST methods return "self" if nothing is explicitly returned? (he would have expected something like "Unit" in Scala, or "Void" - which I know makes little sense in a world like ST's, so I didn't include this in the Stackoverflow question) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14047887/why-do-methods-return-self-by-de... 2) In Collections, why does "add:" return the object being added, and not "self"? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14047940/why-does-add-return-the-object-a... ---- The original interaction in the Scala mailing list (nice language, by the way) was here: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/scala-user/gPEJNAEZO-8/discussion Thanks a lot in advance! Sebastian