Question

In the following italicized code, why don’t we put “IntIndexer” in front of myData = new string[size]; since Customer cust = new Customer(); (assuming Customer is the name of the class):

*Customer cust = new Customer();*

using System;

/// <summary>
///     A simple indexer example.
/// </summary>
class IntIndexer
{
    private string[] myData;

    public IntIndexer(int size)
    {
        *myData = new string[size];*

        for (int i = 0; i < size; i++)
        {
            myData[i] = "empty";
        }
    }

Answer 1

To break this down:

Customer cust = new Customer();

This can be broken into two parts:

Customer cust;
cust = new Customer();

The first line says that the name cust will be able to refer to objects of type Customer. The second line creates a new Customer object and makes cust refer to it.

The other example you give is already broken into those two parts:

private string[] myData;

and:

myData = new string[size];

If the array of strings was to be of a constant length, we could collapse this onto one line as well, in IntIndexer (before the constructor).

private string[] myData = new string[100];

But we need to use the size passed into the IntIndexer constructor, so we have to split the declaration and initialization into two steps.