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

[Paul Duffin]

Andrew Kuchling wrote:
> 
> Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:
> > This IL stuff is not a big deal intellectually so why doesn't M$ just
> > release the language definition and sources and let the big & small guys
> > play?
> 
> It would certainly be interesting to see a spec for MSIL and CLR, in
> order to gauge the complexity of writing an independent
> implementation.  It might provide a decent chance of unifying the
> hopelessly fragmented state of scripting languages on Unix.
> 

This is exactly what Jean-Claude Wippler has been trying to do for ages. I
don't know if you remember Minotaur but it is conceptually the same as .NET
except that it used Forth as the lowest layer (the IL).

I have had a look at .NET at it seems really neat, if only it was not
proprietary and worked across multiple platforms. If that was so then it
would probably replace JVMs and Java would be just another language you 
could choose to use, rather than one you have to use because of the hype.