Comment by fweimer

I think with CLOS, you can go back to using single verbs for function names. However, this has a performance cost. Encoding the receiver type in the function names makes the call much easier to optimize.

What remains is field access. Curiously, first-edition K&R C actually required similar type-encoding in field names because field names were global:

https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=288637

Same for ML, which is roughly of the same age, except that it took much longer for ML-derived languages to lift this restriction.

On the other hand, every time I wrote down examples that I think should look really bad in prefix notation, like this one:

    p3.x := (p1.x + p2.x) / 2;

It is actually not so terrible with a sufficiently streamlined prefix syntax:

    (setf x p3 (/ (+ (. x p1) (. x p2)) 2))

But maybe there should be a mechanism that the reader transforms p1.x to (. x p1), in the same way that it transforms 's into (quote s). Then we get this:

    (setf x p3 (/ (+ p1.x p2.x 2)))

Or if there is a concept of a place:

    (set p3.x (/ (+ p1.x p2.x 2)))

But that probably needs static typing for an efficient implementation (or set needs to deconstruct its first argument during compilation).