Saturday, I conceded to take part in that podcast that James and David and Michael do. This is not an advertisement. At all. It's a bunch of rambling and talking over each other, where my contribution is to take nothing seriously and mock much of what is said. I'm not sure they'll invite me back anytime soon.

At one point, we had a discussion about why there is no second and third methods. Pros and cons both ways of course. And we looked at some code in the system where at: 2 is used, and surmised what this told us.

Anyway, in flippancy, I suggested that one way of encoding a large range of at: someIndex methods tersely was to simply use roman numeral selectors. The nice thing about roman numerals is that they start at one, so they match Smalltalk code well. I was then challenged to make it do tail based access as well. I had said I would use case for this distinction, but in the end decided to use a trailing underscore to indicate that the selector should go from the back of the collection, rather than the front. Mixed case is supported.

What a pile of manure, huh? But such is the normal kind of fun hack for me. And it turns out that NormalManure is a nice anagram for "Roman Numeral", so I published it in the Open Repository under the name of NormalManure. The other part of the blog title composed of roman numeral characters (my second candidate for a goofy package name).

So, load that. Now instead of having to use verbose method names like first, you can just i. And if you want last, you just use i_. You can evaluate the expression of Object comment D which will return the 500^th element of Object's comment. Enjoy.