If I had a simple way to plug Delphi into VStudio I would give it a spin (provided I could test without shelling out any money other than my valuable time!). From a quick look I see no evidence that this is currently possible. I also wondered whether it would
EVER be possible.
Hi Paul. Your statements about Eiffel.NET and multiple inheritance are somewhat intriguing and we've had a conversation going recently in this thread on the subject of inheritance: http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=67477 I was hoping
we could entice you to pop in and give your two cents on the matter of how some of the "messy" issues of inheriting two different object get taken care of in Effiel?
The Delphi IDE has arguably been very good all along, but the new version has some cool features that VS might never see: e.g. fwd/reverse engineering of UML. Not saying that delphi is better than VS, but certainly hope it doesn't get "plugged into" VS--the
IDE has a lot of merit on its own. I understand C# and Delphi have some common origins, and the similarities are striking, so I think that Delphi is going to lose a lot of ppl to C#.
One of the first languages I learned besides Pascal was SmallTalk. This was a great and easy to learn OO Language. I thought I remember hearing that this language would offer a .NET version. Does anyone know if this and true, and if so, where can I find information
on it. Thanks
Someone here mentioned Fortran.NET. How well will it do? I thought Fortran was good because it was targeted for number cruching and is well optimized for that. But if it gets converted into IL and then later into machine code for execution, then there are no
special optimizations. Will it still be useful? Just asking. Also, I saw A# (ADA.NET). My quesiton on that is, I thought the US Dept. of Def. needed a language that had strict real-time, fault-tolerance, and mission-critical requirement? Later it was expanded
into a general purpose language. But I think for A#, it'll probly be more for nastalgia or as a hobby for those who want to toy the language... what do you think? Just asking. Delphi.NET looks interstesting. I hope it'll be the same Delphi. What I don't know,
I'm hoping some of you may, will they port a clone of the VCL into a .NET namespace? That's, IMHO, what makes Delphi what it is, especially to those of us who have learned it and use it. Just asking. I like programming win32 assembly. I've seen an effort of
someone to port MASM to MASM.NET, primparily for ASP.NET. Don't know what ever happened to it. Anyone know? Thanks, _Shawn
I started playing with OCAML and noticed a link that pointed to Microsoft where there was a paper on F#. It's basically an implementation of OCAML, I believe. I still program occassionally in LISP and would love to see LISP.NET. If there is an implementation
people will use it, especially those already familiar with it. Rob
There have been several languages ported to the JVM, and these could probably also be changed to target MSIL/CLR. This is a boon for language developers for two reasons. First, it gets pretty close to "write once run everywhere," as Sun is always proclaiming
for Java. Second, you have a JIT compiler on most platforms that do some optimization for you. So writing your compiler back end is easier with only one or two targets. The bad news is that besides the syntax, languages have semantics. VB.NET and C# were defined
in parallel with the CLR, so their language semantics are compatible with the CLR and the program is fairly easily translated into MSIL and the .NET Framework class libraries. FORTRAN should take some shoe-horning to put it into the CLR. Its a procedural language
instead of an O-O language so there's a big impedence mismatch. But FORTRAN is old enough that its a fairly simple language so not a big problem to translate. COMMON areas probably become singleton classes in the CLR, and similar tricks. On the other hand,
C is a real pain, since the CLR basically prohibits pointer arithmetic. Ada has a problem, because of the multiprogramming features built into the language. This means that you have to jump through lots of hoops, meaning lots of excess code to execute, in
order to get the languages semantics working acccording to definition in the CLR environment. This slows down and bulks up the programs. This is made worse when you take the typical "good programming practices" of those languages into this environment. So
you end up having programmers who know a language and are very skilled and productive at it, finding that they are faced with three problems. First, they have a language implementation that has many, often very subtle, semantic differences that they have to
learn and work around. Think riding a bicycle with wobbly wheels--the better a bicyclist you are the more annoying it is. Second, there are going to be many .NET Framework capabilities that are beyond your reach--FORTRAN will not be able to take advantage
of any objects. Third, there are going to be many .NET Framework capabilities that you can take advantage of, but only after a lot of learning curve on .NET, and learning how to twist your programming to use those features. I'm all for alternative languages
where they naturally fit the problem to be solved. That makes a job soooo much easier. However, in the .NET environment, much of the "problem" to be solved is using the .NET environment, meeting users' expectation of programs in that environment, and keeping
up with Microsoft's changes to that technology. Add in the tendency of businesses to want to hire young and cheap programmers who only know the latest wiz-bang language and environment, and the market for alternative languages is not real good, unless they
can find a very secure niche.
Last time I looked at various languages this is what I saw APL from Dyadic seems to have vanished from the radar (abandoned?) FORTH was still a proof of concept There were two smalltalks S# (not issued yet and may be only one person working on it) and another
version (forget name) Eiffel is out there of course Two FORTRANS if I recall correctly Mondrian was still a research language (non commercial) X# had been canned and it's features are going into C# and VB.NET There is a version of Oberon (from ETH I think)
may be research language Plus a variety of things from Microsoft Research A PERL that is not fully .NET from ActiveState (now taken over) A research Python that is apparently real slow and in development IronPython (from one of those involved with AspectJ)
this may be really interesting Delphi.NET is available in a Borland IDE but not for VS These may not be entirely accurate but they do show a very slow emergence of real commercial languages for .NET and even fewer that have all the grunt that comes from VS
integration. Then of course there's Monad but that's something different!!
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