Hello Jerry!

*** 21.09.2003 at 21:57, Jerry Coffin wrote to you:

 JC> At 05:48 PM 9/21/2003 +0100, you wrote:

Oh i got a new name :-)    -------^^^

 >>  JC> Because somebody wants it to run there, obviously.

 >>I mean do you actually believe that Microsoft would make a VM for 
 >>Linux?

 JC> That depends on whether they think it would be profitable -- but
 JC> it's more or less irrelevant whether MS does it.  One of the
 JC> benefits of it being an open standard is that it allows others to
 JC> implement it on Linux (or Solaris, HP-UX, OS/400, etc.) if they
 JC> want to.  

I've heard about the Mono project, which is doing .NET on the UNIX
platforms, so maybe it's not nessersary to do that.. 

 JC> MS is a large and influential company, but they're hardly
 JC> the sole source of all software, or anything like that.

Mainframe software too? ;)

 >>What generation of programming language would you say .NET is then?

 JC> .NET isn't a language, it's a platform.  Of the languages that run
 JC> on it, most are solidly in the 3rd generation camp.  Offhand, I
 JC> don't claim intimate knowledge of all the languages available on
 JC> .NET -- it's possible somebody's implemented a 4GL on it, but if so
 JC> I'm not really aware of it. 

I bet it's mostly like Java, in the way of compilation, I makes a binary
file, which isn't able to run without the .NET rutime thing.

 JC> Since it may not be obvious, I'll point out that 4GL is really
 JC> fairly independent of the age of the language -- C (sticking to
 JC> topicality) is clearly and definitely a 3GL.  APL has been around
 JC> since 1964 or so, but it's clearly a 4GL.

I did never wrote APL, I'm not a member of the typically fidonet generation.

 JC> To a minimal extent, the standard library for C++ attempts to add
 JC> some 4GL-like features, but they're clearly parts of the library,
 JC> not the language. 

Some yes. 

 >>  JC> Offhand, I'm hard put to think of much of .NET that's _not_ an
 >>  JC> impelementation of some open standard.
 >>
 >>Is there specifications how the platform in implemented?

 JC> Not really of _how_ it's implemented, but of what it has to
 JC> implement.  I.e. they're pretty careful to stick to specifying the
 JC> externally observable behavior, not things like the data structures
 JC> you need to use to implement it.  

Hmm.. okay.

 JC> This is common to nearly all
 JC> standards -- e.g. the C standard mostly specifies the language a
 JC> compiler has to accept, but contains essentially nothing about how
 JC> to implement a lexer, parser, code generator, optimizer, etc.

Indeed, the native compiler does only runs PDP-11 :-)

 >>Sorry, I'm just sick of hearing Microsoft are _allways_ doing the right
 >>thing, and Microsoft's products is _allways_ the best...

 JC> I didn't say (or intend to imply) that. IMO, MS has designed a
 JC> somewhat better VM for .NET than Sun did for Java -- but that's
 JC> only saying that MS avoided some of the more egregious and obvious
 JC> errors Sun made.  

Yes, but many pointed out that .NET would be a plop, one reasons for it, is
that .NET is not more than 10 years old, and many programming langauges is
only used then they got alot of experience..

I were visiting IBM together with my school, a programmer told there, that
they didn't even use C++, it was too 'new'.

 JC> The fact is, VM technology is nothing new, but
 JC> for reasons known only to themselves, Sun seems to have ignored
 JC> nearly everything that's been learned from all the other VMs, and
 JC> instead started over from the beginning.  If the Java VM had come
 JC> out just about the time the USCD P-system was running out of steam
 JC> (i.e. about 20 years ago) I'd have said it was a nice incremental
 JC> improvement.  Unfortunately, it ignores the massive amount that's
 JC> been learned about VMs since then; because of that, it was
 JC> basically obsolescent before it was even finished.

BTW I read that Sun did rewrote the VM so it's mutch smooter and faster..
Did anyway try the new J2EE edition?

 JC> IOW, in this case I think MS has done a better design, but that's
 JC> not saying MS did a particularly wonderful job, only that Sun did a
 JC> rather poor one.

Okay.

Regards,
        Bo

--- timEd/Linux 1.11.b1