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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."
Ok, I know I'm a bad coder for liking C sharp, but gcc should really support it - like it or not, college computer science people *are* learning it, and Free software should support it. In fact, supporting visual basic compilation wouldn't be a bad idea either...
Whidbey is the code name for the next Visual Studio, not just C#.
You've truely engineered something great not when you can't add anything more to it, but only when you can no longer remove anything from it.
Its great that they are adding new features. But are they removing anything that was decided to be a bad idea? Now is the time to do it, in the early versions shortly after its birth, before there is too much legacy code...
Will MS begin to use this for its own products like Office in the near future?
There's an island just outside of Seattle that is called "Whidbey Island".
Seems like a pretty limited spec.
All it says is:
Plugger: No approperiate application for type application/msword found!
whatever...
Actually, Whidbey is the code name for the next release of Visual Studio and .NET Framework. C# is just a part of it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/road map.aspx#whidbey
C# is ECMA standardized. Java is wholly owned by Sun. Sun has repeatedly balked at standardizing Java due to the inherent loss of control.
Perhaps there are potential submarine patents, but Java is absolutely vendor-tied while C# is at least relatively open.
I'm still not sure why one would use continuations for well-designed code (kind of like labels in C++). I think the Ruby FAQ has the best statement on continuations.
-----
Ruby's continuations allow you to create an object representing a place in a Ruby program, and then return to that place at any time (even if it has apparently gone out of scope). Continuations can be used to implement complex control structures, but are typically more useful as ways of confusing people.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
No, but consider the competition. C++ is insanely complicated and broken, and is popular. Perl is insanely broken and complicated, and it is popular.
Anyway, anonymous higher order functions and generics are two really glaring deficiencies in Java, C#, and many other modern OO languages, so adding them is a step in the right direction. It's not as if these are minor, useless features.
> Is this their plan to "lock in" universities to teaching microsoft programing to all levels, because it will take
> 4 years of classes just to cover it all?
That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
Perl 6 will have continuations...
h tm l
http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000156.
I like to think of it has C Pound.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
You can already develop in C# for Office with Visual Studio Tools for Office.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
OK so I'm in the position of having to write an emergency support application for a M$-based system in a M$-based environment. Stuck in there. Completely. Been requested to make a maintainable, manageable solution. And yes, this is to say "make it for M$, with M$ tools as much as you can".
.NET, M$ introduced a quite nice API and Java language (come on, where are the real differences) into Visual Studio, which at least saved my day; I had found an acceptable programming environment for within Windows..!
I guess even within these circumstances, I'd have refused to open Visual Studio for this project, if it didn't say ".NET" as well. I mean, think of it: previous versions of VS only supported C++ or VB, with APIs to cry for (admittedly, I don't know about MFC, only about Win32).
I actually happen to dislike C++, but on top of that, it doesn't suit my project, because the low-levelness makes it harder to program without errors (e.g. null pointers, memory leaking). I'd rather have a language at a scripting level -- and NO, that's NOT VB. I hope I don't have to explain why I hate VB if only on very first sight.
So with
There's really no need for anybody to pick on C#, long as it's realized that it's just finally a nice programming environment for Windows, and nothing (well, not much) more. (BTW, it's not much different from NeXT (now Apple)'s use/ takeover of Objective C.)
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
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.
That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
Thats a great idea. Sounds great on paper, sounds great in theory. Sounds great while you're playing around with a bubble sort.
After that, its a load of crap.
Tell you what: You learn your bubble sort however you want. Your assignment is to write a program that uses a row colored spheres with numbers texture mapped to the surface of the sphere to demonstrate how the bubble sort actually operates.
I learned to do this at my university, and was lucky enough to get a professor that hadn't bought into the Windows Thing, and tought graphics programming with OpenGL (available everywhere) instead of DirectX (available in windows, and if you're lucky, wine).
In fact, when you get out of your pretty little university, you can try and get a job on "I know my programming theory". If you don't know the language and APIs that Company X is using, you're sunk. These days they don't settle for learning on the job. I had a wonderful job interview for developing an interesting application, I wowed them all with my knowledge, except for one little thing: I didn't know Perl/GTK which was what they were writing their application in. A few weeks later I got a check in the mail for my flight, car rental, and hotel and a thank you letter for taking the time to interview them in person.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
wow, that will they think of next?
C is a low level language and makes no bones about it being such.
Is such a high level language such as one that is designed to run upon other protocals the same?
No.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
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.)
It's really C-Hash.
Or as Microsoft execs like to pronounce it amongst themselves, cash.
-- Alastair
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 still find it vaguely amusing that Microsoft released a product which cannot be properly displayed in the Latin-1 character set,
The octothorpe symbol, '#', has slanted vertical strokes. The "sharp" sign has slanted horizontal strokes.
Personally, a "broken" language is a language that requires so much work to do things right that programmers that use them frequently do things wrong. For example, my all time favorite security flaw: the buffer overflow.
A good language should support the development of code that doesn't contain common flaws. In my opinion, C and C++ are directly responsible for security flaws that cost trillions.
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"
Universities are right to teach important concepts (and not just algorithms like bubble-sort -- that's friggin freshmen stuff anyway) like software engineering, project managment, relational algebra (i.e. database stuff), networking, AI, parsing, logic, circuit design, and (I'm lumping here) under-the-hood operating system concepts.
If you've got a Computer Science degree, and you payed attention, you can pick up the syntax for a new language within an hour. With a good API reference, you can be banging out code like an old pro with a weekend of study. It's not that hard.
What matters far more than how well you know a language is how well you know how to program. Any monkey with a keyboard can whip out a Visual Basic app.
But to write truly masterful code... that transcends skill with a language and approaches art.
That said, I'm going to contradict myself: it's important to know the basic capabilities of the language you're working with. Java would be a shitty language to write, say, a program that computes the sum of the two numbers input to it on the command line, because it takes so long for the VM to load -- far more than the actual execution time of the program.
Fortunately, things like that can be quickly learned.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Not true. Check out University of Waterloo as an example of Microsofts approach to exposing C# to a new generation of developers. Well, engineer's, but close enough. ;-)
Who is John Galt?
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)
The next version will of course have features from Esperanto, Mandarin, and Martian.
I'm all for extending a language, but they haven't had C# around enough to be larding new stuff on. The language already had several ways to do most things, now they're adding more?
If we wanted ten ways to do anything, we'd use perl. If we're not using perl, that usually means we like to be a little more constrained.
-andy
C# is basically Java for Windows, take two. It does seem to have learned from the evolution of Java and cleaned some of the messier bits.
Exception handling is a little looser, without the need to declare thrown exceptions or catch those declarations. There is a still an exception based error handling system, it's just more implicit than explicit.
I really like the properties, an idea they took from Visual Basic. At some point in Java history (birth of EBJs?) it was concluded that public class variables were a bad idea. Java standardized on a getter / setter model that is more a convention rather than a language rule. C# uses a property, which has either a get, set, or both. If fills the same OOP niche, only more cleanly.
There is also some neat static ( class level ) functionality. Interestingly, while exceptions aren't explicit, inheritance is. A method must be declared virtual to be overridden, a more C++ thing to do.
Basically, there are many little changes from Java that make C# not Java. But, the changes do make sense and make C# an enjoyable language to program in.
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.
Here's a clue: null pointers and memory leaks are not "low level" problems--they're logic errors. Dereferencing a null pointer can happen in Java, and accessing a disposed object can happen in C#. Memory leaks and null pointers usually mean you aren't managing an object's lifetime correctly, and are typically symptoms of design errors (or minor bugs--off by one, etc.--which can happen in any language).
C# is like most MS tools--great for 80% of the work, but the last 20% is difficult or nearly impossible because MS didn't think of the problem you were trying to solve, and the language isn't flexible enough to adapt.
Finally, it is impossible to report errors in the implementation. When I found a serious error in the .Net runtime, I tried several ways to report it, getting no answer, or in the case of the microsoft.* newsgroups, assertions that I couldn't find bugs since the high-and-mighty MS and testers hadn't find it.
Sigh. Compare that to the people who hang out in comp.lang.c++.* -- I ran screaming away from C# as quickly as possible.
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)
"C# is ECMA standardized"
BWhahahaha, you fell for that, huh? Propaganda makes trolls all over the world.
I'm in web development ( full microsoft environment ) using C#, SqlServer2000, WinXP
Pros:
Cons:
Of course not.
But those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
From the C# 2.0 spec:
"When an instance of Stack<int> is created, the native storage of the items array is an int[] rather than object[], providing substantial storage efficiency compared to the non-generic Stack. Likewise, the Push and Pop methods of a Stack<int> operate on int values, making it a compile-time error to push values of other types onto the stack, and eliminating the need to explicitly cast values back to their original type when they're retrieved."
Java uses Object boxing for built-in types in their generics implementation.
It's Sea Octalthorpe. I would've called it ++C, but that implies that something is actually more advanced than C.
.NET's pupose is not to allow Windows software to run on other platforms, but rather to help M$ capture more platforms. It's doomed from the beginning, and will be another forgotten buzzword within a few years.
Honestly why should one bother? It's neither portable nor natively executable. It's neither scalable to embedded systems nor to high-end servers. It has neither legacy code nor a bright future.
Mono is a good start, but M$ will fight it when it starts to show results.
I like Java, I like C, and I like C++. Each of them rock and suck in different ways.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Please. Its just C. The rest of the line is a comment.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Java announced Generics months ago. In all, it seems like the java stuff is more exciting, although the lambda-like stuff in C# seems interesting.
Java generics are broken because they don't guarantee type safety across compilation units. That requires VM changes, changes that Microsoft was willing to make but Sun wasn't.
Java is more and more turning into an accumulation of evil kludges. Instead of type-safe generics, we got a hack. Instead of lexical closures, we got nested classes. Instead of structs, we got some half-hearted promise of optimization under some nebulous set of circumstances that can't work in general. Instead of multidimensional arrays, we got some classes with a horrendous syntax that, on some theoretical JIT, might actually run faster than a snail.
I don't know whether C# will grow up into a well-designed general purpose programming language, but it is crystal clear that Java has missed the boat.
Wrong.
Pascal is not meant for serious programming like C is, but Pascal has sorta grown into this business application language, and is far from obsolete.
You also cannot do anything in C++ that you can in C. You can do this in C, but not C++:
Or...
These examples were shamelessly ripped from Bjarne's FAQ, which is available Here.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I'm the last man in the world to support Java, but C# is optimized to windows, and probably matches the OS's file system better. I'm not sure if C# would do as well in an non-MS environment
This is a pet peeve of mine. LANGUAGES SHOULD NOT BE DEBATED BY THEIR STANDARD LIBRARIES. Don't like a library? Download another. Buy one. I'm sure theres 50 gadzillion XML libraries floating around. Chances are you'll like one better than the default. If you want to debate languages, debate the features of the language- what does one language enable you to do natively that another doesn't, or what does one make easier?
This is why languages should NOT have huge libraries. The designers of a language do not get everything right, especially the first time through. Invariably, third party designers who can focus in on one area can make a better API. In languages where they have huge standard libraries, like Java and C#, people tend not to bother because there's one already there. Unfortunately, that makes people end up using terrible APIs (the original Java gui, anyone?), and leads to a lot of bad comparisons between languages that have nothing to do with the languages.
They'll come, C# hasn't been around as long. ALthough what the hell those things are I don't know (and beign a C programmer, never will need to. Nah!)
I've found a lot of inaccuracies in MSDN, although I admit the idea is nice. But comparing webpages about the two languages in a language comparison? Just plain inane. A nice help page or not has nothign to do with a language!
Again- the IDE is not a language feature. Its not really a good way to compare two languages.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
You would consider it a feature that there aren't third-party tools to improve development and deployment?
I have no idea what Sophia is, but I used java for a long time before hearing of struts and ant (you know, you can use Make with java). Struts takes the generic specs and makes things a lot better. They're both optional. Like many other misguided souls, I've written apps completely in jsp as well.
Third-party options that fit into standards, make things better, but are not required are an advantage, not a disadvantage.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Ok, this is actually a .NET issue, not really a c# issue.
.NET, are text based streams, made up of 16-bit chars. When writing a (16-bit) char to StandardOutput it is converted to something else (UTF-8, maybe).
.NET, vim + .NET framework and the online MSDN reference is completely sufficient.
StandardInput and StandardOutput, in
Piping binary data from one app to another is a very non-trivial task.
These are the small "features" that make c# unsuitable for anyone "thinking UNIX". Of course piping through stdout/stdin is not needed: you can use remoting, sockets or whatever - but those make easy things hard.
Anyone who has written a c# program that uses stdin/stdout for binary data?
BTW, you definately does not need Visual Studio to program
1 is only in the spec stage here, whereas for Java there is already a technology preview, i.e. a more or less working implementation
There has been a working implementation of generics for over a year now (for rotor).
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?
do you *really* think this design was an accident?
-- kryps
After reading this I'll understand that C# generics really suck, big time, compared to C++ templates.
The constraints are really a pain in the butt, as you must specify what interfaces that the 'generic' type must implement, and not what specific methods of the interfaces that the generic type must implement. What you say, you may think: But if I wanted any type that has a method named 'void Print()' to be executed by my generic class, all of those types must implement a named interface (IPrintable). That is perhaps OK if I have full control over the source code, but whatif I'm using a library written by someone else?
If you don't specify a constraint the 'generic' type will effectivly be of type Object, and we all know how much we can do with the type Object. Hmm, let me think, oh yeah: ToString. No need for generics there.
The examples in the spec are also mostly container class examples, wonder why? Perhaps that the generics of C# can't do anything but (or mostly) container (or container like) classes.
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
on some theoretical JIT, might actually run faster than a snail.
You do know that java is faster than C# for non-GUI apps, right? source. I suspect that if you dump swing and go with the eclipse SWT, you probably equalize the GUI speed issue too, which would mean that on windows platforms Java is faster than C#.
The "java is slow" reputation was earned with java 1.1 and was fixed long ago when the JIT VM's came out (they are part of all modern JVM's). Memory use issues might give you a real issue to knock java on, but you really shouldn't repeat untrue lore.
The biggest chunk of any language is it's vocabulary. In this case it's API.
There are OSS J2EE projects (Jboss, Jonas, Jakarta's new project).
And then there is this purely proprietary thing called MBF - Microsoft Business Framework.
BTW to emphasise that the beef is in API, not language, let me remind you that .NET Framework can be programmed in many languages (C#, VB.NET, Managed C++, etc.).
What other nearly-irrelevant subset of the beef is standartized by ECMA? Ones-and-zeores maybe? You know: "our systems are open, 'cause they are based on "ones-and-zeroes" standard" ;-)
Anyway, ECMA seems to be almost a joke in terms of freedom of their standards: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/0,14179,2832719,00.html:
And it appears that ISO (C#/CLI are ISO standards too) is no better: http://www.imaging-resource.com/NEWS/1027527673.ht ml (JPEG no more?):
So what is a safer bet, OSS Java or .NET? Of course .NET, because it's closed and thus patent-torpedoes-invincible - can license patented technology, unlike all those open J2EE projects...
I'm sure it's better to suffer proprietary lock-in than potentially-deadly patent threat. Right?
Yet, even MS can be torpedoed successfully once in a while (e.g. that plugins patent hitting IE).
Software world seems to be a mess with no clear future perspective.
[Sorry for a somewhat-messy/offtopickish post.]
> C# is ECMA standardized. Java is wholly owned by Sun. Sun has repeatedly balked at standardizing Java due to the inherent loss of control.
I suggest you write the following lists side-by-side:
On the left, list the companies with members on the standards committe participating in defining the specification of upcoming versions of the Java language (JSRs 14, 175, 176 and 201). Count how many times each company appears on these lists, too.
On the right, list the companies with members on the standards committe participating in defining the specification of upcoming versions of the C# language.