It's not a direct answer, but an interesting side-light: The recent announcement of Gravel Smalltalk, billed as Smalltalk for the Java VM (https://github.com/gravel-st/gravel) mentions as 'common Smalltalk features that we probably won't support' both become: and thisContext. Presumably omitted because they can't be done in Java.
 
Peter Kenny

From: Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org] On Behalf Of Sergi Reyner
Sent: 25 March 2014 10:27
To: Any question about pharo is welcome
Subject: [Pharo-users] Java "this" against our "thisContext"

Hi everyone,

I had a pretty heated IRC debate yesterday about how Smalltalk�s reflection facilities are superior to those of Java, in the sense that they operate at a higher level (I started it pasting one of those crazy snippets that got posted to the list xD). It somehow slowly degenerated into someone trying to convince me that Java's "this" operator is equivalent to "thisContext", instead of "self".

My intuition says that�s wrong, but I�d very much like someone familiar with both to offer an explanation to this poor unenlightened person :D

Cheers,
Sergi