Lambda the Ultimate

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ECMA has approved the ECMAScript for XML (E4X) Specification, which defines the syntax and semantics of a set of programming language extensions adding native XML support to ECMAScript:

E4X adds native XML datatypes to the ECMAScript language, extends the semantics of familiar ECMAScript operators for manipulating XML objects and adds a small set of new operators for common XML operations, such as searching and filtering. It also adds support for XML literals, namespaces, qualified names and other mechanisms to facilitate XML processing.

E4X goes back to a request by BEA in March 2003.

From Peeking Inside the Box.

An interesting look at the addition of annotations to the next generation Java. Not sure what the main purpose of this metadata is, but the author discusses it in terms of debugging and instrumentation.

Annotation definitions look a lot like interface definitions, but the keyword @interface is used instead of interface and only methods are supported (though they act more like fields).

   public @interface Status {
       String value();
   }

I can now define my method as follows:

   @Status("Connecting to database")
   public void connectToDB (String url) {
       ...
   }

Mono 1.0 has been released, following a speedy set of beta releases. The detailed release notes are interesting. Mono is also being used to build Nemerle a "functional .NET language compiler".

Sven-Olof Nyström presented his Soft-typing system for Erlang at the 2003 ACM Erlang Workshop. I haven't tried it, but I thought it looked promising. His conclusions are thought-provoking too.

The [New] Great Computer Language Shootout


This has probably already made the rounds of everyone's favorite language-specific mailing lists, but I hadn't seen it show up on LtU. One of the Debian developers has taken it upon himself to re-implement the infamous "shootout", which hasn't been updated since 2001. Most included languages have had compiler/runtime/interpreter upgrades since the original, so there is definitely some new data lurking around in all those familiar old microbenchmarks.