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Why should "perform" be a message? It's just a method of the Object class, which is the superclass of Integer. You can use my St80ClassBrowser and St80ImageViewer (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/) to check the ST-80 source code and image if you want; there is a list of all selectors and the classes which implement them. Going up the class hierarchy when doing virtual method dispatch is a fundamental concept of all object-oriented implementations; in contrast to e.g. C++ this can be done dynamically at runtime in Smalltalk or Java (which is also called late binding). In contrast to Smalltalk in Java the class loader verifies that a method for the referenced signature actually exists; in Smalltalk you can try to dispatch any signature which can result in a call to the doesNotUnderstand method of the Object class.
Cool! I program for around 7 months in Pharo now at Yesplan [0]. We're hiring a devops engineer and a software engineer. While the Pharo website [1] avoids mentioning it, it's a Smalltalk descendant.
What I like about Pharo:
1. Programming in the debugger makes things feel much quicker
2. Evaluating expressions inside your code editor makes programming feel much quicker
3. The ability to quickly browse classes and methods makes programming feel much quicker (e.g. I type Date somewhere, select it, press CMD+B and now I browse the Date class).
Don't get me wrong, Pharo has downsides, especially when it comes to using it in production (IMO). With that said, the language feels fun to use! I definitely like it now as my first language for side projects as it is more graphical, more playful, and feels quicker for iterative development (e.g. when consuming APIs). It's why I wanted to learn it in the first place, it has shown me a different philosophy on how programmers interact with a programming language and IDE.
[0] https://yesplan.be/en/vacancies
[1] https://pharo.org
I haven’t used Pharo myself, but it looks like it doesn’t necessarily require storing everything inside an image. I see lots of projects linked from the Awesome Pharo repository [1] that are just source code text files in Git.
[1]: https://github.com/pharo-open-documentation/awesome-pharo
AFAIK Pharo is a fork of Squeak, which is much more open about it being a smalltalk programming system implementation.
https://squeak.org/
