Modern C# Part 2 – Accessing via Implicit Index

Until now, if you wanted to access the last item in a list you had to use a slightly cumbersome syntax. C# 13 introduces the “hat” operator (^) where ^1 is the last element in your collection, ^2 is the penultimate member, etc.

Like many things, this is best illustrated with an example. In the following code I create a simple Person class and initialize a list<Person> with three people (persons?)

 internal class Program
 {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
       var tester = new Tester();
       tester.Test();
    }
 }

 public class Tester()
 {
    public void Test()
    {
       var john = new Person { Name = "John", Age = 25 };
       var jane = new Person { Name = "Jane", Age = 30 };
       var joe = new Person { Name = "Joe", Age = 35 };
       var people = new List<Person> { john, jane, joe };      
    }
 }

 public class Person()
 {
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
 }

Straight forward. Now, if I want to access the last person in this list I can write

 var lastPerson = people[^1];
 Console.WriteLine($"Last person is {lastPerson.Name} who is {lastPerson.Age} years old.");

As you can see, this is concise and easy to understand. You read it as “lastPerson is equal to one back from the end of people.” Let’s run it:

Last person is Joe who is 35 years old.

That is all there is to it. Easy to use and somewhat helpful in simplifying your code.