Month: February 2008

Macros, and languages within languages

By jonskeet

Ian Griffiths mailed me about macros, and explained how LISP macros were very different to C/C++ macros, working at a language level instead of at a text level. I won’t pretend to understand all about what would be possible and what wouldn’t, but Ian gave a good example: query expressions in C# 3. Instead of being part of the language itself, they could apparently have been written as macros, if C# supported them. Then if you wanted to have similar support for different forms of expression, you could just write your own macro library. Assuming that’s what people are actually … Continue reading Macros, and languages within languages

C# 4, part 3: Ideas from Microsoft

By jonskeet

Microsoft haven’t committed to anything in C# 4 yet. However, there have been hints about what they’ve been considering in Eric Lippert’s blog, and more than hints in Charlie Calvert’s blog. There’s not a lot to go on yet, but: Immutability support Most of Eric’s posts about immutability have so far been about immutable data structures. However, the first post in the series did mention that they’re playing around with immutability from the point of view of potential language support. Joe Duffy also wrote about immutability at roughly the same time. What can we expect in terms of support? Possibilities: … Continue reading C# 4, part 3: Ideas from Microsoft

C# 4, part 2: Ideas from other community members

By jonskeet

There has been a fair amount of speculation online about what should be in C# 4. I’ve taken the list below from a few posts, primarily those by Ayende and Jeremy Miller. I’ve deliberately left out the ideas that Microsoft have mentioned that they’re at least considering – they’ll come in the next post. Mixins I suspect everyone has a different idea of what these mean, but I’ll say what I’d like. I want to be able to implement an interface by proxying all calls (other than those I’ve actually implemented) to a particular member variable, as an aid to … Continue reading C# 4, part 2: Ideas from other community members

A simple extension method, but a beautiful one

By jonskeet

This came up a little while in a newsgroup question, and Marc Gravell and I worked out a solution between us. I’ve finally included it in MiscUtil (although not released it yet – there’s a lot of stuff ready to go when we’ve finalised namespaces and updated the website etc) but I thought I’d share it here. How often have you written code to do something like counting word frequencies, or grouping items into lists? I know a lot of this can be solved with LINQ if you’re using .NET 3.5, but in .NET 2.0 we’ve always been nearly there. … Continue reading A simple extension method, but a beautiful one

C# 4, part 1: Looking back at the past

By jonskeet

Everyone else is speculating about what’s going to be in C# 4 (and various possibilities are coming out of MS), so I thought it would be wise to start my own series of wishlist posts before I miss the boat completely. In this first post, I’m not going to look at the future at all – I’m going to look at mistakes of the past. When I say “mistake” I of course mean “things I would have done differently had I been a language designer with 20/20 hindsight”. Of course, there’s a lot of room for argument 🙂 Mistakes in … Continue reading C# 4, part 1: Looking back at the past