RE: Microsoft .Net, Ada should be at the head of this list

["Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Gerhard Häring et al.
The reason I posted this was to benefit the commercial use of Ada. I
doubt that Microsoft would believe that Ada was a serious commercial
threat. It would be benefit the software industry and customers, if
Microsoft by mentioning Ada, would help in the commercial development of
Ada.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org] On Behalf Of Gerhard Häring
Sent: Sunday, June 02, 2002 12:45 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Microsoft .Net, Ada should be at the head of this list

Robert C. Leif wrote in comp.lang.ada:
> From: Bob Leif
> To: The Ada Compiler vendors and other interested parties
> 
> I just wandered into Microsoft .NET Language Partners site.
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/partners/language/default.asp
> 
> "The multi-language capability of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio
> .NET enables developers to use their existing programming skills to
> build all types of applications and XML Web services. Find out about
> each .NET-based language and how the common language runtime (CLR) can
> help you build more integrated, higher-quality applications faster."
> 
> The languages and vendors listed include: APL Dyadic Systems),COBOL
> (Fujitsu COBOL), Eiffel( Interactive Software Engineering), Forth
> (Dataman), FORTRAN
> (Fujitsu Fortran & Salford Software), Haskell (Massey University),
> Standard Machine Language, SML,(Microsoft Research), Mercury (The
> University of Melbourne), Mondrian (Massey University), Oberon
(Computer
> Systems Institute at ETH),Pascal (Queensland University of Technology
&
> TMT Development), Python (ActiveState), RPG (ASNA), Scheme
(Northwestern
> University), and SmallScript(SmallScript corp.)

Note that many of these are only proof-of-concept implementations.
I've only read about the Python implementation, but this
proof-of-concept wasn't very successful: it was too slow for any
serious use. The reason given was that the MSIL doesn't lend itself to
such dynamic languages as Python, and thus several inefficient
workarounds were used to implement a Python compiler _at all_. The
proof-of-concept implementation and the Python for .NET Research
whitepaper can be found here:

http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/Initiatives/NET/Research.html?_x=1

The research was sponsored by Microsoft and there are currently no
plans to pursue the Python for .NET idea any further.

I'm not sure if any of the above can be considered production quality
compilers. It may well be that the only usable .NET compilers are
currently produced by Microsoft.

> Ada should be at the head of this list!   

I'm sure if will happen iff there is serious commercial (instead of
idealistic) interest in it.

Gerhard
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