This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Everything old is new again Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

The MS guys are rediscovering yet another old Smalltalk idea - treating an object as if it were an array. Take a look at #instVarAt: and #instVarAtPut: in class Object (never mind that doing this sort of thing is typically a very, very bad idea):

http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive140.html

C# introduces a new concept known as Indexers which are used for treating an object as an array. The indexers are usually known as smart arrays in C# community. Defining a C# indexer is much like defining properties. We can say that an indexer is a member that enables an object to be indexed in the same way as an array.

%A0  this [argument list]
 {
%A0 get
%A0 {
%A0%A0 // Get codes goes here
%A0 }
%A0 set
%A0 {
%A0%A0 // Set codes goes here
%A0 }
 }

Of course, the beauty of this is that C# had to add new syntax to do this, while the equivalent Smalltalk functionality is just another set of methods. So the C# guy has to memorize yet another set of reserved words, while the Smalltalker simply looks at the library. Sometimes I'm amazed at how Java and C# are examples of Smalltalk being re-invented - but with a crufty, inelegant syntax....