On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 04:06 PM, james_b wrote:

[snip]

  The OO languages I'm familiar with all seem to put the focus on the 
receiver rather than the message, in such a way is to imply that the 
two are necessarily coupled:
>   reciever.message( arg1, arg2 )
> Maybe because I read left to right, or because I first learned 
> procedural programming languages, but this format strongly suggests 
> that the message is part of the object.

> [snip]

I think there are a couple of things going on here.

First, the human interface idea is that people first select an object 
and then decide what they want to do with that object. For example, one 
might select a word processing file and then open it, print it, email 
it, convert it, etc.

Second, there is the linguistic factor. I think it is not so much that 
you read left to right but that English sentences are formed in 
subject-verb-object order. The subject is, perhaps, the controller part 
of the program, the verb is the method and the object is ... the 
object. The order in object oriented programming languages is (always?) 
subject-object-verb. Interestingly, this is also the order in Korean 
and Japanese (and a few other languages).

Regards,

Mark