[e12e]

See also:

Smalltalk faq: "Q28. What is the difference between chaining and cascading?"

http://www.ipass.net/vmalik/smalltalk.html#Q28

[TranquilMarmot]

So, pretty much whether everything is being applied right to left vs being applied left to right?

Personally I like chaining because, since I read going right to left, in my head I can go "x goes to y then the result of y goes to z" versus "z is the result of y which is the result of x" (reading it backwards)

[e12e]

I wasn't clear, but I meant that mostly as a comment to:

> This is always what I thought OOP should be, but could never put my finger on.

I'm not sure what Simula did, but at least in Smalltalk this is how OOP have worked :-)

> So, pretty much whether everything is being applied right to left vs being applied left to right?

I'm not sure that's the best takeaway; consider:

    $ gst
    GNU Smalltalk ready

    st> 2 * 3; * 3; * 3
    6
    st> 2 * 3 * 3 * 3
    54

Now, if the object on the far left was some kind of accumulator/container, the effect of sending something like three "add the number 3" would be similar to chaining. But even if you mulitply the number 2 by 3, three separate time, 2 * 3 still equals 6.

In fact, in order to get chaining with keyword messages, you apparently need to define it, or especially adapt eg: containers to return ^self. But as should be obvious, I'm not very familiar with Smalltalk. Some more on the subject: http://blog.3plus4.org/2007/08/30/message-chains/