PLNews: Programming Language News

Mono 1.2.5 has been released. Mono is a portable, open source .NET CLI implementation.

This release includes: DLR-related fixes; support for C# 3.0 features such as variable type inference, anonymous types, array type inference, object initialization, collection initialization, and automatic properties; improvements to the invocation speed of non-multicast delegate methods; SSE2-optimized double to int conversions on x86; the addition of an IL verifier; bug fixes; and other changes.

The Developer Tools Group of Borland Software Corporation has announced the availability of the new line of Turbo development tools. Available are Turbo Delphi, Turbo Delphi for .NET, Turbo C++, and Turbo C#.

Borland Software Corporation has announced plans to relaunch its Turbo brand of development tools. The products will include Turbo Delphi, Turbo Delphi for .NET, Turbo C++, and Turbo C# for .NET.

General availability of the products is planned for the third quarter of 2006.

It has been announced that on April 20, 2006, there will be a MSDN Chat involving the members of the C# compiler and language design team.

Miguel de Icaza is looking for developers to test the generics support of the Mono C# compiler, to ensure that recent bugfixes have not introduced regressions. Mono is a portable, open-source implementation of .NET.

The second part of John Osborn's interview with C# architect Anders Hejlsberg is now available. The first part of the interview was made available on October 17, 2005.

This part of the interview discusses LINQ, comparing it with technologies for embedding SQL within various programming languages. There is some focus on the functional programming capabilities making their way into C#, as well as some discussion regarding upcoming developments. Hejlsberg also suggests that developers take advantage of the C# 2.0 generics and stronger typing, in addition to looking at the 3.0 previews.

It has been announced that the next C# User Group of Greater Boston meeting will be held on November 1, 2005.

Chris Bowen will discuss C# practices to avoid, and how to avoid them.

ONDotnet.com is running an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of C#.

It starts by discussing C#-related developments over the past five years, including the effect of C# and .NET on Java usage, as well as the C# standardization efforts. There is also some discussion regarding the first-class treatment of properties, events, and methods in C#, plus some discussion about LINQ. Hejlsberg talks about C# generics, and how they compare with Java generics and C++ templates. Anonymous methods, nullable types, and other upcoming developments are also mentioned.

Borland Delphi 2006, C++Builder 2006 and C#Builder 2006 have been announced. They will be available for pre-order between October 17 and December 1, 2005, with shipment scheduled for early December.

According to a recent article by Danny Thorpe, Borland Chief Scientist, the Delphi compiler includes support for operator overloading syntax in Win32, and inlining of compiler magic functions.

Miguel de Icaza has written a short article outlining the plan for including C# 3.0 support in Mono. Mono is a portable, open-source implementation of .NET.

The current plan is to focus on polishing the Mono C# 2.0 compiler and runtime classes, to help ensure a stable platform. He feels that the new features are "relatively simple", but support is not planned for the Mono 1.2 release, and he suggests that it will be a few months before such work begins.

MSDN has put up a page describing the features planned for C# 3.0.

C# 3.0 plans to draw from functional programming, with features such as:

• Implicitly typed local variables, which permit the type of local variables to be inferred from the expressions used to initialize them.
• Extension methods, which make it possible to extend existing types and constructed types with additional methods.
• Lambda expressions, an evolution of anonymous methods that provides improved type inference and conversions to both delegate types and expression trees.
• Object initializers, which ease construction and initialization of objects.
• Anonymous types, which are tuple types automatically inferred and created from object initializers.
• Implicitly typed arrays, a form of array creation and initialization that infers the element type of the array from an array initializer.
• Query expressions, which provide a language integrated syntax for queries that is similar to relational and hierarchical query languages such as SQL and XQuery.
• Expression trees, which permit lambda expressions to be represented as data (expression trees) instead of as code (delegates).

The third editions of the C# and CLI Ecma standards have been approved. The new C# standard includes support for generics, nullable types, and anonymous methods. The CLI standard includes a parallel API allowing for the easier development of multithreaded code, and support for generics.