Amen. The part about data flow is insightful. The idea of overloading it into whitespace is insane. There has to be a better way, and SmallTalk's might be it.

Blocks delimited by whitespace work because they rely on a familiar set of conventions that have already evolved among most programmers over 30 years or more (and interestingly, a lot of programmers still really hate the idea of having it enforced). Moving what is essentially the alleged JavaScript BadPart(TM) "with" into an overloaded whitespace/dot combo is going to throw at least as many programmers for a loop as "with" has.

I also think there's something smells wrong about the examples. For all the dataflow insight -- did I miss the part where he talks about how exactly we're keeping track of the destination of the return values? And the problem with the ".pop" example specifically might be less that you can't call it fluently three times than that you have to call it three times to get three items off the collection instead of ".pop 3".

There's no destination, exactly.(I think). A "data scope" for lack of a better term just implies that all functions are called on the object returned by the statement that introduced the scope.

It is _exactly_ like JS's 'with' statement, just that we let the language automatically infer that we probably meant "with".