Thanks for that explanation! Is there any form of sandboxing in Pharo VMs that would prevent accidental side effects like the hard drive reformatting?
One striking demo I saw once a few years ago (so details are a bit hazy) involved the become: message. This is a special operation for swapping references around. "X become: Y" has the effect of everything that previously referred to X to now refer to Y, and everything that previously referred to Y to refer to X.
So the demo was to execute something like:
White become: Black.
which immediately switched all white pixels to black and vice versa.I think the person giving the demo even demonstrated
True become: False.
though that made the VM unusable pretty much immediately IIRC.