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

[Mark Hammond]

"Paul Duffin" <pduffin at hursley.ibm.com> wrote in message
news:397EDA34.9CFF2BF2 at hursley.ibm.com...

> How likely do you consider the possibility that Microsoft will change
> the IL to allow the non-MS languages to be fully supported ?
>
> Unless the probability is VERY high

Better than "VERY high" - they have already done it.  MS have been
_excellent_ at listening to 3rd party language feedback.  For example, the
functional language guys are very impressed that MS managed to get tail
recursion instructions in the VM, in time for the PDC.  No current or
future MS languages have this requirement, and not even any of the
(expected to be successful) commercial languages - it was done exclusively
for the "little languages".

To be quite honest, I have been constantly amazed at the effort MS are
putting into 3rd party languages.  It is more than mere hand-waving.

> what is the point of doing this
> at all as you would end up with a versions of the language which were
> not compatible with the other versions.

What is the point in making assumptions and statements like this?  Try
finding some facts before you attempt to invent more "evil empire
evidence" to support your conspiracy theories.

But to address your point:  JPython is _not_ a perfect emulation of
CPython, but it does allow you entry to the Java playground.  Python .NET
is similar - I don't expect anyone will use it when they want to work in
an exclusively Python environment, just like almost no one uses JPython in
that way now...

Mark.