From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2001-04-06T16:12:18+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:13528] Re: Newbie Question

On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Clemens Wyss wrote:
> I would have expected that Ruby raised an error here!
> Smalltalk has the following methods:
>    at: <key> put: <value>       	    	    	    
> which would raise an exception if the key/index does not exist.

Well, Ruby's #[]=(key,value) is not an equivalent to #at:put: method.
It's more like:

if in ordered collection:
	if key is negative:
		add length to key
	if key not found:
		if collection is auto-extensible:
			extend collection to key+1 elements
		else:
			whine
now do Smalltalk's (self at: key put: value).

this does not describe support for ranges, lengths, strings, and
regexps, as arguments to #[]= for (ordered) collections that support them.

matju