In many object-oriented programming languages, one calls a method or accesses a field of an object using the dot operator; for example, obj.m() calls the method m of the object obj.

There is a special kind of site call in Orc which serves a similar purpose. One may write x.msg, for any identifiers x and msg. This treats the value bound to x as a site, and calls it with a special message value msg. If the site understands the message msg (for example, if x is bound to a Java object with a field called msg), the site interprets the message and responds with some appropriate value. If the site does not understand the message sent to it, it does not respond, and no publication occurs. If x cannot be interpreted as a site, no call is made.

Typically this capability is used so that sites may be syntactically treated like objects, with multiple methods and fields. For example, a channel c might understand the messages get and put, to get values from and put values on that channel, respectively. Such calls would be written c.get(), or c.put(6).

A call such as c.put(6) actually occurs in two steps. First c.put sends the message put to the site c; this publishes a site whose only purpose is to put values on the channel. Next, that site is called on the argument 6, sending 6 on the channel. Readers familiar with functional programming will recognize this technique as currying.