New S# Language - Smalltalk for .Net

curador writes "In an interview with David Simmons, CTO of SmallScript Corp., we learned about a new .NET language about to debut...." I was surfing around and found this article and had not noticed it on /. yet so start your flame engines please!"

Comments

My question is this...

[MonTemplar]

How much does SmallScript have to pay Microsoft for the use of the # in S#? :)

What's next

[ajw1976]

Logo.net

Re:Nothing to flame

[Khalidz0r]

Java.NET already exists, under the beautiful name of C#

Re:better than a new VM

[Anonymous Coward]

"Plan9 talks via a published protocol [9p] implementable on any platform."

Sure. Let us know when it's available for the timex-sinclair, Atari 400, and commodore 64.

Null handling

[Ed Avis]

From the article:

S# helps solve some relatively intractable problems. For example, you may declare a parameter of a public method as an object of type String. Within your method, you call the String.IndexOf method. So far so good--but you have to plan for errors. Another programmer is perfectly free to call your method and pass a Null (Nothing, in VB.NET). Despite the fact that Null is not a String, the .NET framework will happily make the call. That means that your method code needs to check for the possibility that someone did in fact pass a Null, and react accordingly. In contrast, in S#, Null is a true object, meaning you can simplify your code by dynamically adding a Null.IndexOf method, and doing nothing. At one fell swoop, you've eliminated both the possibility of an error and all the "if (var == null)" checks you have to write in other languages.

Oh yeah, sure, you've really eliminated the possibility of error. Why not add every method to the 'null' object while you're about it, then your program could _never_ have null-related bugs!