Lambda the Ultimate

I noticed that WebL was mentioned in the thread on NQL on the old Lambda, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message3567.html#3592
as not being maintained any more, it seems that it is maintained at the following site: http://www.research.compaq.com/SRC/WebL/

there are a number of old projects around the same site: http://www.research.compaq.com/SRC/software/

some of these are also on the currently maintained http://www.research.compaq.com/downloads.html
WebL among them. (Some of these look quite tasty and useful)

a language that is not being maintained on the new downloads is obliq: http://www.research.compaq.com/SRC/personal/luca/Obliq/Obliq.html

which strikes me as being relevant to the whole argument about objects and messages.

You're part of the C# language design team thinking about the next version of C# (ie the version after VS 2005). You get the following email:

When I'm writing code, I often come across a situation where my code throws an exception because another component called with a null parameter. I'd like a way to prevent that from happening.

What are the pros and cons of such a feature? What are the ramifications of adding it to the language? What would have to change? What is your recommendation? Exactly what would such a feature look like?

A discussion over on Eric Gunnerson's weblog.

I suppose this is one way of doing language design. You are welcome to comment on the specific issue, or on this cutting edge language design technique ("just blog it, silly")...

Just to get the juices flowing, I should point out that this is a type system issue.

Should we have a language design department for general discussions about language design?

From: mike@erix.ericsson.se (Mike Williams)
To: erlang-questions@erlang.org

[...]

As one of the main "actors" in "Erlang the Movie", I
absolutely and categorically forbid its showing *anywhere*. If there
was a competition for "turkey" short movies, I think we would win
hands down.

So, please, please, please, forget we made that retched film in 1990!

That's right, now you too can own the movie that "Bjarne used whenever he wanted to get rid of unwanted guests at CS lab parties"! Download the torrent or the file on erlang.org if you have 200MB of disk space to spare!

No, no and again, NO!!!