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

[Mark Hammond]

"Moshe Zadka" <moshez at math.huji.ac.il> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.10.10007270810400.2823-100000 at sundial...
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Mark Hammond wrote:
>
> Hmmm...this sounds positively interesting. Do you know if there is
similar
> support for continuations? IOW, can Scheme be supported on IL?

AFAIK, continuations are currently being fudged, but MS have promised to
add more stuff like this after release.  Unfortunately, "after release" is
still some time off.  For all of my MS praise in the last mail, it should
be obvious thay are still a commercial company with a tight deadline.
They have said a number of times "if you can work around it, do" -
tail-recursion turned out to be an issue that was extremely difficult to
fudge, so support was added pre-beta.  Continuations are simpler to fudge,
so explicit support was pushed back.

I know of at least one (fairly) complete and fast scheme implementation.

> That's sad -- JPython, CPython and Python .NET should feel the *same*.
> That's why we have a standard (the Python Language Reference Manual).
> I truly hope JPython and Python .NET (is that the official name)

No idea what the official name is!  Python .NET seems to make sense at
this stage.

> will be similar enough to CPython that Python code will work across them
> seamlessly.

I agree.  Although there is a dilemma here - sometime you _must_ make a
choice between the language semantics versus the platform semantics.  ie,
it would be just as much of a shame if JPython and/or Python .NET didnt
support enough platform semantics to make it a viable language on that
platform, thereby keeping it stuck in an "interesting, but not useful"
flux.

I dont believe this needs to be a real problem.  When implementing a new
version of Python, you will be amazed at how much _isnt_ spelt out.
Fortunately, the implementation is clean and available, meaning the
existing C code is usually a better reference than the docs!  Im fairly
confident I can support all documented semantics, and plenty of
undocumented ones.

Mark.