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You say

> it could have been more cleanly designed if it was able to abandon the burden of Objective-C interoperability

You mean this for the language itself and not the (standard) libraries; right?

> The standard libraries could have also been much cleaner if it didn't rely on NextStep.

I agree.

There are at least a few aspects of the language (eg, the special case for the first argument passed to a method) which would be completely bizarre decisions if not for the Objective-C compatibility requirements. Though I think they're tweaking that a bit.

> special case for the first argument passed to a method

Are you talking about the weirdness where the first argument doesn't require a label? If so, that decision has been made explicit in the last few dev snapshots of 3.0. Basically, if you don't want to require a label when call a function/method then it must be made explicit.

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