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

[Mark Hammond]

"Cees de Groot" <cg at gaia.cdg.acriter.nl> wrote in message
news:8ln84n$380$1 at gaia.cdg.acriter.nl...

> ...and is soooo innovative that it does exactly the same thing as Java
> and the JVM, only five years later and at the vaporware stage.

vaporware == beta distributed to thousands of people?  Since when?
Anyway...

I think you should wait for the jury on this one.  There are alot of
academics who have ported their languages to both the JVM and the .NET
runtime.

It is safe to say that no one I have met with experience in both these
technologies shares your opinion.

People obviously _do_ share some general concerns about MS, but if you
limit yourself to a discussion on the technical merits of these
technologies, you wont find many people on your side of the debate.

Watching the reactions of the dyed-in-the-wool-MS-hating-academics was
almost the most interesting part of this project.  Suffice it to say they
started the project with their "Tux" t-shirts being worn proudly every
(single, smelly :-) day, but by the time the PDC came around they were
first in the queue for their .NET tshirts ;-)

> (http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html, support /that/
many
> stuff on your little VM, M$).

I am sure they will, and I am sure the majority of language implementors
will agree it is an improvement (again, if viewed purely from technical
grounds)

> ... happily going back to Java, Python, SmallTalk, Scheme, XML and
whatnot

Not sure what point you are trying to make here?  These, plus others, are
also on .NET.  You should have listed languages that people have heard of,
and are not announced for .NET.  Maybe you had the "TRS-80 Model 1 BASIC
Interpreter" implementation in mind?

Mark.