Hi Wolfgang,

>But I must admit that once in a while I get most enjoyment by not accepting "it" 
>as it is. There are days I dare to think about adapting it to meet my needs.

>Even if this means considering "mainstream" or "low level" programming idioms 
>like counting from zero.

>Sorry about my bad habits -:)

This is not a bad habit, it is exactly what you should do with Smalltalk.
If a class does most of what you want you can and should extend or subclass
it to do exactly what you want.  In the case of arrays you can make your
own class of array that indexes any way you want.  If you want to index it
with negative numbers you can.  There may or may not be some performance
hit in doing so and you will need to decide if it is worth it.  It could be
that there is some source of the negative indexes that is out of your
control and the easiest way to handle and use them is to make your own
array class that uses them.  This is what Smalltalk is all about and not
too easy in most other languages.

Lou
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:Lou at Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com