Kay's original conception of the language, as related by him in practically every of tens or hundreds of public lectures, op. cit., or perhaps it could refer to a code snippet by Ralph Johnson, demonstrating all the basic standard syntactic elements of methods: exampleWithNumber: x | y | true & false not & (nil isNil) ifFalse: [self halt]. y := self size + super size. #($a #a 'a' 1 1.0) do: [ :each | Transcript show: (each class name); show: ' ']. ^x < y Literals The following examples illustrate the most common objects which can be written as literal values in Smalltalk-80 methods. Numbers. The following list illustrates some of the possibilities. 42 -42 123.45 1.2345e2 2r10010010 16rA000 The last two entries are a binary and a hexadecimal number, respectively. The number before the 'r' is the radix or base. The base does not have to be a power of two; for example 36rSMALLTALK is a valid number equal to 80738163270632 decimal. Characters are written by preceding them with a dollar sign: $A Strings are sequences of characters enclosed in single quotes: 'Hello, world!' To include a quote in a string, escape it using a second quote: 'I said, ''Hello, world!'' to them.' Double quotes do not need escaping, since single quotes delimit a string: 'I said, "Hello, world!" to them.' Two equal strings (strings are equal if they contain all the same characters) can be different objects residing in different places in memory. In addition to strings, Smalltalk has a class of character sequence objects called Symbol. Symbols are guaranteed to be unique—there can be no two equal symbols which are different objects. Because of that, symbols are very cheap to compare and are often used for language artifacts such as message selectors (see below). Symbols are written as # followed by a string literal. For example: #'foo' If the sequence does not include whitespace or punctuation characters, this can also be written as: #foo Arrays: #(1 2 3 4) defines an array of four integers. Many implementations support the following literal syntax for ByteArrays: #[1 2 3 4] defines a ByteArray of four integers. And last but not least, blocks (anonymous function literals) [... Some smalltalk code...] Blocks are explained in detail further in the text. Many Smalltalk dialects implement additional syntaxes for other objects, but the ones above are the essentials supported by all. Variable declarations