Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

17.2. Examining CIL Directives, Attributes, and Opcodes

When you begin to investigate low-level languages such as CIL, you are guaranteed to find new (and often intimidating-sounding) names for very familiar concepts. For example, at this point in the text, if you were shown the following set of items

{new, public, this, base, get, set, explicit, unsafe, enum, operator, partial}

you would most certainly understand them to be keywords of the C# language (which is correct). However, if you look more closely at the members of this set, you may be able to see that while each item is indeed a C# keyword, it has radically different semantics. For example, the enum keyword defines a System.Enum-derived type, while the this and base keywords allow you ...