Am 08.12.2021 um 22:56 schrieb Richard O'Keefe <raoknz@gmail.com>:

Other programming languages use terminology like slots,
fields, data members, ...

The keyword 'instanceVariableNames:' is used because the
string that follows contains the names of the variables,
not the variables themselves.

To experience that go into settings (under the ��Pharo�� menu item) search for ��slots��. You will get this

If you open a new system browser it looks like this

Collection << #SmallDictionary

slots: { #keys . #values . #size };

tag: 'Dictionaries';

package: 'Collections-Unordered��

which resembles the slots representation better.

Hope this helps and not raise confusion even more.

Norbert