Re: Ada & .Net (Rotor)

["Alexandre E. Kopilovitch" <aek@vib.usr.pu.ru>]

Pascal Obry <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>but if the .NET was the answer, what was the question ? A market
>share, the fight with SUN and Java... what's the real value for the
>enterprises ?
Surely the .NET is a big enterprise of a huge company, and as such it has many
sides and aims. But as you ask about the real value, I suppose you mean a value
for programming (or software engineering) progress... Personally I prefer to
consider .NET as an attempt to build something like SuperDelphi (but certainly
in Microsoft's envelope). I did not yet look at the .NET (although I have read
C# draft docs when it was made available), so all what I can say about it is
a pure guess, and those who do not need the guesses in the presence of real
things should not read this message further.
  Note three things: 1) chief architect for Delphi and for the .NET is the same
person; 2) COM (read COM+ if you like) is already well-established object system,
independent of a particular programming language; 3) Microsoft Visual Studio
already has quite good IDE with many advanced features, and is generally
approved by programming community. So, why not to combine the things? Well,
it requires huge efforts, but Microsoft can afford that (and thanks Sun, has
a stimulus to do that). And it seems quite possible that the Delphi's chief
architect might consider that as an excellent challenge - to build the Super
Delphi, with COM instead of Object Pascal objects, CLI in the place of VCL etc.
  In addition, I found it particularly interesting that some part of the .NET
will be somehow available on FreeBSD (as "David C. Hoos" <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com>
pointed out in his reply about the "Rotor": "...a substantial subset of what
is available in the Microsoft .NET Framework. The source code will build and
run under Windows XP or FreeBSD 4.5, ...").


Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia