[saghm]

Thinking more about this, I'm realizing that Swift was probably transitively inspired by Smalltalk; although I don't know much about Objective-C, my vague understanding is that it's a bit more inspired by Smalltalk's view of object-oriented programming via message passing than what commonly is considered OO nowadays (which is reflected somewhat in that it doesn't use the typical dot-operator for method calls), and I'm guessing that it was included in Swift as one of the things that was liked about Objective-C (and maybe a little to make interop more direct).