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X# Functional Programming from Microsoft?

Posted by timothy on from the rumor-pile dept.

TheSync writes "SearchWebServices.Com has an article claiming that Microsoft is working on a functional language named 'X#'. The language is supposed to be data-oriented and LISP-like, but set up to handle XML."

7 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong by sporty · · Score: 5, Informative

    "You can't just import an XML file and magically have it available to your program. You have to first put it through some sort of transformation, which requires work that is unnatural or unwieldy." -- Sean McGrath

    yes you can

    --

    -
    ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

  2. Water language and X# by Mike.Plusch · · Score: 3, Informative

    X# sounds like it is trying to achieve some of the goals of the Water language (Water posting on Nov 22, 2002.) Given that XML standards are used for defining APIs, data types, data, RPC, and presentation, it only seems logical to extend XML to handle general purpose logic. Working with XML from Java feels like writing a Java program using C libraries -- everything is a foreign call.

  3. Just a proprietary xquery? by etedronai · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am highly skeptical of things like this because it seems to just be microsoft attempting to control an xml based data language as a reaction to a similar open language, xquery, being developed by the w3c.

  4. Re:Alternatives by opiate · · Score: 3, Informative

    What you want to look at for processing XML in a "lisp-like language" (Scheme) is SXML and its related packages (SXPath, etc.)

    These are packages for manipulating and representing XML content in Scheme programs.

    XML can be seen as a syntax tree, right? XSL and its friends are tree manipulation tools.

    The same can be said for Lisp and Lisp-like languages, whose "program as data" philosophy (and 35 years of history) focuses on program evaluation as tree transformation and manipulation (through nested lists.)

    SXML is a translation of XML from its heavy angle-bracket syntax to a Scheme sexpr (Scheme/Lisp's bracket expression syntax) syntax (and back to XML again.) It's extremely powerful.

    It's worth looking at if you spend large amounts of time manipulating XML data.

  5. it's bogus by nickos · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'd love to think that Haskell was getting this kind of attention, but text at the bottom of the page reads:

    "This bogus press release made the rounds on April Fools Day, 1998. Not long after this was released, Simon Peyton Jones announced his move to Microsoft (an event that caught the author of this press release by complete suprise!)."

  6. Re:Alternatives (Water -- www.waterlang.org) by Mike.Plusch · · Score: 2, Informative

    Christopher Fry and Mike Plusch have developed the Water language. Christopher Fry was one of the original developers on Macintosh Common Lisp when it was Coral Software. Water was designed to be as easy as Basic, but give you all the power (and more) of Lisp. Water was designed to support both object-oriented programming and functional programming. It uses the ConciseXML syntax and uses the syntax for data, logic, and presentation. Water is an All-Level Language because it can be used for both high-level and low-level tasks.

  7. X# is not a new language by Utopia · · Score: 2, Informative

    The article is largely incorrect.

    X# is an extenstion to C# to enable easy quering and manipulation of XML data; layered on top of XQuery.