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In Objective-C, you can't declare method names where the last component doesn't take an argument. For example, the following is illegal. -(void)take:(id)theMoney andRun; -(void)take:(id)yourMedicine andDontComplain; Why was Objective-C designed this way? Was it just an artifact of Smalltalk that no one saw a need to be rid of? This limitation makes sense in Smalltalk, since Smalltalk doesn't have delimiters around message invocation, so the final component would be interpreted as a unary message to the last argument. For example, BillyAndBobby take:'$100' andRun would be parsed as BillyAndBobby take:('$100' andRun) . This doesn't matter in Objective-C where square brackets are required. Supporting parameterless selector components wouldn't gain us much in all the usual ways a language is measured, as the method name a programmer picks (e.g. runWith: rather than take:andRun ) doesn't affect the functional semantics of a program, nor the expressiveness of the language. Indeed, a program with parameterless components is alpha equivalent to one without. I'm thus not interested in answers that state such a feature isn't necessary (unless that was the stated reasons of the Objective-C designers; does anyone happen to know Brad Cox or Tom Love? Are they here?) or that say how to write method names so the feature isn't needed. The primary benefit is readability and writability (which is like readability, only... you know), as it would mean you could write method names that even more closely resemble natural language sentences. The likes of -(BOOL)applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:(NSApplication*)theApplication</

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