Lambda the Ultimate

Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz
started 8/11/2001; 6:20:26 AM - last post 8/13/2001; 7:56:57 AM

Ehud Lamm - Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

8/11/2001; 6:20:26 AM (reads: 2916, responses: 6)

Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

(on TechNetCast)

CLR is the Mircrosoft commercial implementation of the CLI ECMA standard. Microsoft is also working on a shared source version, which will not include features not in the ECMA standard, that are built into the commercial CLR.

The shared source version uses a BSD like license.

Posted to cross-language-runtimes by Ehud Lamm on 8/11/01; 6:27:53 AM

jon fernquest - Re: Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

8/11/2001; 9:25:25 AM (reads: 1767, responses: 0)

A couple of things I heard peaked my interest:

1. Finally the death of syntax? The Common Language Runtime separates syntax from functionality: "The CLR allows you to define a class in Visual Basic and inherit from it in Cobol, or to raise an exception in JScript and handle it in Perl." - Eric Meijer

http://ecoop2001.inf.elte.hu/technical_program/invited1.html

Perl-like COBOL? http://www.adtools.com/info/whitepaper/dotnet_whitepaper.html I've always wanted to use Python's sparse syntax for Object Oriented programming because it's easy to read and refactor and Scheme's uniform s-expression syntax for functional programming because parens help you bookkeep functional compositions and partial applications of arguments and Prolog syntax rules for logic programming. Perhaps the days of mixed use of syntaxes has arrived?

2. The instruction set operands of the Common Intermediate Language are untyped to support generic programming ? Generic programming based on the "Common Type System? " ? This must be Simonyi's Intentional Programing that's simmering on the back burner....the Microsoft MOP. The editor in Intentional Programming includes source code refactoring capabilities. But I haven't seen MS mention design patterns yet.

3. I saw that Eric Meijer of Haskell fame behind Mondrian is giving a course on the CLR. Could MS have some long term plans for integrating a functional language like Mondrian into their development tools?

(MFC and WIN32 API programming was pretty ugly but what they're doing now looks more polished and sophisticated. MS has been hiring people from academia right and left from their research arm.)

4. Common Language Runtime reminds of the Perl Instructions that trigger low level string handling routines like regexes....

Haven't checked out the Haskell and Python lists where there is supposed to be extensive discussion of the IL, but the Mercury Logic Programming language at the University of Melbourne has already developed a code generator that was funded by Microsoft.

5. What is the relation, if any, between the MS funded Cminusminus and the Common Intermediate Language?

Chris Rathman - Re: Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

8/11/2001; 10:01:47 AM (reads: 1774, responses: 0)

5. What is the relation, if any, between the MS funded Cminusminus and the Common Intermediate Language?

IIRC, Simon Peyton Jones was heavily involved in C-- (as well as Haskell - and the projects are related to each other). He's now on the Microsoft payroll, along with a bunch of other FP people.

3. I saw that Eric Meijer of Haskell fame behind Mondrian is giving a course on the CLR. Could MS have some long term plans for integrating a functional language like Mondrian into their development tools?

With as many high quality FP people that they have on the payroll, I'd be very disappointed if they don't get around to doing a functional language - I'd prefer something along the lines of Visual Haskell.

Ehud Lamm - Re: Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

8/11/2001; 12:19:11 PM (reads: 1763, responses: 0)

See also Visual Studio Partners - Language Vendor and Daan Leijen's home page (I am working on an integration of Haskell into Visual Studio, called Visual Haskell. Visual Haskell integrates with either Visual Interdev or Visual J++ 6.0.)

Ehud Lamm - Re: Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

8/11/2001; 12:58:42 PM (reads: 1766, responses: 0)

A related thread on the PLT Scheme mailing list about bytecode unification for scripting and/or functional languages. Choosing the CLI/CLR is also discussed.

Willy Heineman - Re: Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David S

8/13/2001; 6:50:43 AM (reads: 1745, responses: 0)

ActiveState received funding from Microsoft to do preliminary ports of Perl and Python to dotNet. They seem to have had mixed success (works but incredibly poor performance) and suggest that more changes to the ILR/CLR is required to support dynamic languages. The Python effort put together a whitepaper about it here http://www.activestate.com/Initiatives/NET/Python_whitepaper.doc

Luis Castro - Re: Intro to the Common Language Infrastructure with David Stutz

8/13/2001; 7:56:57 AM (reads: 1748, responses: 0)

To me, the most interesting bit of the interview is that CLR doesn't try to abstract the machine to provide a common target for languages. The specific characteristics of the machine are supposed to "pass through" to the language implementations.

In that sense, it seems that CLR is actually abstracting the languages in order to create a common runtime environment (the reverse direction of what was done in Java).