I just checked in a small change to Finch that I think makes the language read better. There is now syntactic sugar for binding a method to an object.

When Finch starts up, it runs a “main” Finch script that builds a bunch of the standard objects and environment. It used to have a lot of code that looked like this:

True addMethod: "not" body: { False } ' define a for-style loop Ether addMethod: "from:to:step:do:" { | start end step block | i <- start while: { i <= end } do: { block call: i i <-- i + step } } ' concatenate two arrays Array prototype addMethod: "++" body: { | right | result <- [] self each: { | e | result add: e } right each: { | e | result add: e } result }

The change is a new “bind” expression using :: . This gets rid of the explicit calls to addMethod:body: and replaces them with this:

True :: not { False } ' define a for-style loop Ether :: from: start to: end step: step do: block { i <- start while: { i <= end } do: { block call: i i <-- i + step } } ' concatenate two arrays Array prototype :: ++ right { result <- [] self each: { | e | result add: e } right each: { | e | result add: e } result }

It’s a little shorter and cleaner, but what I really like is that it lets the parser validate your method signature a bit. Where addMethod:body: takes any string as a method name, this ensures that your method name is something the parser won’t choke on.

It also ensures you have a single argument for an operator ( self is the other, of course), or an argument for each keyword for a keyword message.

I should take this opportunity to point out that I’m also starting to get some documentation online too. This and the rest of Finch’s expression syntax is now fully documented. Almost like a real programming language!