Microsoft's C# (Sharp) & .NET -- A Heads Up

[Alex Martelli]

"Hartford Hackers" <cmyanko at bigfoot.com> wrote in message
news:8ljvta$epd$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
> Is it me or has it been totaly missed that C# sits on top of the Common
> Language Runtime Libray. It supports, Eifle, Perl, Python, VB, C++, C#
> and Java. Any language can call any object from any other language!

I have not missed it, but it surely bears emphasizing.  Although Java is
not what Microsoft is hot about -- substitute Cobol in that list, I
guess:-).
(And most languages will be in dialects/subsets for full IL interoperation;
e.g., Eiffel# rather than real/full/true/complete Eiffel, since IL does not
support multiple inheritance of implementation, which full Eiffel wants;
dunno what Python .NET will do about that).


> My question though, is, how does this effect future versions of Python,
> or Perl for that matter? Who controls the distribution of this library?

CRL (or CLR or whatever the correct acronym happens to be) is a
Microsoft-proprietary thing; I doubt it will be available for non-MS
platforms, judging from how COM fared on such platforms in the
past (e.g., Mozilla has its own portable COM clone, but I do not think
it interoperates with any other COM, clone or true, on the planet).

ActiveState is handling the porting of Python and Perl to the .NET
framework (and thus, to IL and CRL in particular), and Hammond in
specific is Numero Uno on Python .NET, it appears from his recent
posts to this group.  But there isn't much yet on ActiveState's site
about either Python .NET or Perl .NET.  Presumably things will be a
little better when Visual Studio .NET's first beta appears (currently,
only a pre-beta of it is yet around).


Alex