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C# 2.0 Spec Released
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft released the design specifications document for C# 2.0 (codenamed 'Whidbey') to be released early next year. New features of the language include generics similar to those found in Eiffel and Ada, anonymous methods similar to lambda functions in Lisp, iterators, and partial types."
Whidbey is the code name for the next Visual Studio, not just C#.
Maybe you want to take a look a mono.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Perl 6 will have continuations...
h tm l
http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000156.
You should get out more. There's a world of programming paradigms most people have never heard of, because they're still stuck using C-alike block structured OO languages.
Continutions are, roughly speaking, a generalization of setjmp and longjmp in C. However, to have true "first-class" continuations they need to be objects that you can pass around, store in data structures, etc. In C this isn't true, because if you return from the stack frame that did the setjmp, the continuation is invalidated. Lisp has "call/cc", some implementations of ML have "calcc" (typed), and many scripting languages have it, because it's pretty easy to implement in an interpreted language.
Continuations can be used to implement exceptions, user-level thread packages, "early exits" from recursive code, and other cool stuff.
It's Scheme that has call/cc. Common Lisp didn't provide it (though it's not hard to write something similar if you really want it.)
Removing something is very difficult. In fact, it is not recommended (unless it is a serious flaw or bug). There may be millions of developers using a particular feature or programming technique that is "bad". If you go and remove it, it could adversely affect all these programmers and their existing code. This is one reason why companies don't really remove features. Backward compatibility in software is absolutely crucial (especially when you force developers to upgrade to new versions all the time).
The best thing to do is to "phase" out the undesired feature by not recommending it, not featuring it prominently in books, shifting features into optional components that must be installed, etc.
I know this isn't exactly the ideal way to do things but I see no other way. I mean, if I was responsible for Visual Studio (or C# specifications), I would not remove features. Who knows who is using a particlar feature?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I'm not a full-time developer, I usually develop some basic web applications to enhance some of the new solutions I implement for Systems Administration. My experience with it is limited, but I'll give you my pro's and con's:
Pro's
Easier access to IO - just try it in Java and see. It's much faster in C#
Improved XML support - also a lot simpler in c#
Not as many third party specifications to learn. I remember having to learn Struts, Ant, Tomcat, and then Sophia after learning JSP - what a pain in the ass.
MSDN - The help system inside VS.NET is better than most languages' will ever be.
Con's
Not the best IDE in my opinon - IntelliJ smokes Visual Studio.NET in almost every respect(except for the help).
Can't use it on Linux or BSD - my applications are bound to fail more frequently than an equivalent Java/PHP/Perl app running on a secure box.
Most of the support I used to recieve about Java, Python, and other open source languages don't discuss c#. There just aren't the same amount of mailing lists, IRC channels, forums, to throw around C# ideas. The ones that do discuss it tend to cater to the Lowest Common Denominator.
I have to resort to Visual Studio 6 in order to create desktop applications that run on everyone's machine. The .NET framework has been a hard sell for the enterprise I work in.
What exactly do you mean by undocumented? The language and virtual machine are fully documented, you can download the sources to jdk and libraries, and is much more open than C$, though less than others open source projects.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
come on, where are the real differences
I thought the same thing. It's actually lots of little things that make C# nicer all 'round (in comparison to Java): Most pleasant for me is the fact that I can use enumerations without (a) declaring a new class/interface (b) placing a ridiculously long "public static final int" before EACH member of the enumeration and (c) being able to use the newly declared enumeration's new type name for parameters instead of just "int" - remember semantics?
Integrating legacy shit is also a snap with C#. Sure, managed C++ is better, but have you tried doing the same thing in Java? Yuck.
Lots of little things like this, IMHO, make C# better than Java.
I hate the fact that Microsoft charges an arm and a leg for Windows/MSVS/everything. But I like C#.
If only it was cross platform from the word go. Mono's nice, but the MSVS IDE is what keeps Microsoft/Windows up and above Linux as far as ease of development goes.
Python's better than everything else anyway. *hides* ;)
First off, Whidbey is the next version of Visual Studio, which is designed to use the dotnet framework v2. The SDK will be released publicly around the same time, so those who prefer Notepad need not pay one cent to write dotnet apps.
n fo/road map.aspx
Secondly, generics, partial types, and such are being added to the CLR, as well as Microsoft's "first-class" languages, meaning that yes VB.NET will include them. VB.NET also gets operator overloading, native support for unsigned types, and in-line XML commenting.
You can read it all at the roadmap here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/producti
It tells about some of the changes to the IDE, the CLR, and the languages. One interesting new "feature" is a sort of grammatical analyzer for writing code that will suggest improvements or corrections, similar to the way word underlines misspellings or grammar errors.
Whether it will be a great tool or a bloody nuisance remains to be seen.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Enums have been added, generics have been added, automatic iteration in for loops have been added, et cetera. True, it hasn't been released yet (the first Java 1.5 betas are due next quarter), neither is Whidbey, and the JSRs have been out for some time, and the prototype compiler with generic support has been available for months.
Okay, no offense, but that's the worst description of continuations I've ever heard. It seems to be giving people ideas that it's like goto, which is a common reaction people have when they first hear about continuations. But it's not accurate. Goto manipulates the instruction pointer alone; continuations manipulate the entire stack in much more interesting ways.
There's some good stuff on continuations out there. They have little use in imperative programming styles like C++ encourages. In functional styles, they're used to implement exceptions, non-determinism, coroutines, generators, and a host of other control features that can open up whole new worlds of programming.
The crack about "ways of confusing people" doesn't mean that continuations tend make your code unreadable, like goto. It means that continuations are a confusing concept, but if you understand continuations, you can make much clearer code.
The quote that the parent AC plagarized is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aircraft designer living in the first half of the 20th century. (And author of The Little Prince, if that hasn't been banned in America yet.) He was speaking in the context of original design, not individual features.
While the plane is still on paper, that's the time to remove all the unneccessary cruft. That's de Saint-Exupery's point. Not after the plane has been built; then the dependancy problems you mention arise. That's not the proper time. Certainly not in midflight.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'm in web development ( full microsoft environment ) using C#, SqlServer2000, WinXP
Pros:
Cons:
Who the hell is the ECMA?
"Ecma International is an industry association founded in 1961, dedicated to the standardization of information and communication systems."
Here is a list of their standards. It includes specs related to C, Ada, IDL, ECMAScript (JavaScript), C# and WSDL. Interestingly enough, Sun and Oracle are absent from their membership list.
Why not an IETF standard?
Hint: the "I" stands for Internet. What does C# have to do with the Internet?
-- kryps
In case anyone reading the parent didn't get it, that means that the C# implementation of generics will have a strong efficiency advantage over Java's b/c boxing/unboxing is a costly operation.
Amazing magic tricks
You are misinformed.
The Console class has indeed two properties: In and Out that are respectively TextReader and TextWriter objects, but there are also the OpenStandardInput and OpenStandardOutput methods that will return you a nice Stream that you can then write directly to (using byte arrays, for example).
And this is all easily done using command line compilers included with the SDK, or in Mono.
See, that wasn't too hard?
Dave