What a fantastically comprehensive (if not exhaustive) set of answers. Thanks especially to Stephane for the book links.
Mention of the strategy pattern, factory methods etc. confirms something i started thinking when I started playing with class methods, namely that some of the GoF patterns make a kind of intuitive sense in Smalltalk, more so than they do in C++. I've read objections to _Design Patterns_, particularly from the FP corner, which basically argue that the implementation code for many of them is a kind of boilerplate that ought to be abstracted into the language itself ("you wouldn't need to write this over and over again if your language supported proper macros / higher order functions / closures / continuations / whatever"). These objections seem more pertinent when you look at the C++ code than they do when you look at the Smalltalk code, which is generally more concise and less contorted.
The idea of coding support for auto-accessors into the browser suggests that Smalltalk *does* give you macros, after a fashion; although you could argue that, in that case, so does VB with its IDE add-ins. It surely helps, though, that the Smalltalk syntax is so minimal (VB's is a dreadfully inconsistent clutter). I'll have to look into this some more...
Stephane's explanation of why "^ super new init" works tallies with what I'd been able to figure out by browsing over Kernel-Object and Kernel-Classes. Just having the system visible in this way certainly helps: I've spent all of two afternoons with Smalltalk so far, and already a lot of things are dropping nicely into place.
thanks again to all - I'll be back... Dominic