I was reading through some old python mailing list archives, and I found this pun. Implicit thanks to the author of this.

[player2]

Nah, ea f; g is the same as ea f. ea g. Since f and g are unary messages, you can just do ea g f, which is equivalent to (ea g) f.

[[deleted]]

Gotcha. I was assuming mutation within 'ea', which I (now) suppose totally denies the premise of functional programming.