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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.
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.
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.
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.
college computer science people *are* learning it
What colleges are teaching C#? At my school we had one Pascal course then went into C followed by C++. I believe we could have taken Assembly right after Pascal, but I'll take that after I finish C++. I've heard of other schools starting with java or even python. I'm not arguing that schools don't teach C#, I just want to know which ones do so I can be sure not to transfer there.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?