Skinnable-Language CLR Revisited
Fergus Henderson (on the Ximian Mono list, regarding One Runtime to Bind Them All):
| a whole generation of programmers may be educated by CLR-compatible| languages, and what they will learn is that all languages are identical.This conclusion is overly pessimistic. Only the CLS-compliant subsets will exhibit such sameness. Component interfaces will be strongly encouraged to stick to this subset, but programmers can use the full features of their language of choice in the component implementation.
Fergus raises a good point. Nothing really new here, in fact. C++ and Smalltalk were always richer within the COM boundary than they could be across it. Same here. Just because not all of a language fits into the Common Language Specification doesn't make it a) unimplementable on .NET, or b) useless on .NET.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/02/21.html#a81