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Alan Edwin Brain <[log in to unmask]>
Tue, 13 Jul 0100 23:35:13 GMT
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>A statement in that article quotes Anders Hjelberg, Microsoft Distinguished

>Engineer, as listing a variety of third party languages, "ranging from APL

>and Cobol to Pascal, Eiffel and SmallTalk, that various vendors are porting

>to support the Microsoft .Net Framework."
>
>Anything missing?

But read carefully and you'll see that it's not Eiffel, it's "Eiffel#". Whether
it's also Pascal#, Cobol#, Smalltalk# isn't clear, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Subsets of the Core language with MS-proprietary Extensions. e.g. Eiffel has
multiple inheritance, Eiffel# doesn't. It will be interesting to see what sort
of bastardised - er - hybridised thing  Smalltalk# turns out to be. But I may
be wrong here. After all, it's not as if MS has an unbroken record of "de-commoditising"
languages... OK it has. But they may change.

Given the power of Ada regarding representation clauses, tasking etc etc and
the limitations likely in .Net, then Ada# may not bear much resemblance to the
standard, even if it was desireable (which I think it may be despite the disadvantages).


Of course I may be guilty of unreasoning prejudice against the Redmond Juggernaut,
and an MS-standard Ada# may be just what the world needs. From what I've seen
of C# it's actually quite a bit better than any implementation of C++ I've seen.
Lots of Ada-like features, more so even than Java 2. And if a 3rd-party vendor
does Ada# (and this seems to be the way things are going), who knows.

So Hope for the best, Expect the worst.

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