Hi all,
it's great to see such lively discussions on the list.
Some people addressed Microsoft's .NET, the Visual Studio.NET
IDE, and Oz for .NET. It's probably a good idea to state our
position regarding these. This post is a little longish,
sorry for that ;-)
> My understanding is that ability to use Oz with Microsoft Visual Studio
> for .Net pretty much falls out of integration of the Oz language with
> .Net(which seems like it might be a smaller project than writing an
> entirely new IDE).
Allow me to clarify this point.
What Microsoft collectively market as .NET is actually a whole
family of technologies.
When one talks about porting some language to .NET, this first
covers the aspect of executing code written in that language on
top of the .NET Common Language Runtime, or CLR for short.
(This also is the context in which Jeffrey Richter mentions Oz
on the web page previously mentioned in this thread.)
This could mean, for instance, compiling to IL (Intermediate
Language) code, which is what the CLR executes. When you include
debug information in your IL - such as what source file and line
a portion of IL relates to -, you get some amount debugging
support for free. And this is basically where integration with
Visual Studio.NET "falling out" of such a project ends.
For closer integration into the Visual Studio.NET IDE, such as
creating and managing projects in your language, providing
editing support for code (syntax highlighting, error checking,
completion and such), automatically building and running from
within the environment, and so on, you have to use proprietary
and non-public interfaces provided by the IDE. Microsoft
has a program called the Visual Studio.NET Integration
Program, or VSIP for short. See for instance:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/vsip/default.asp
> This _seems_ by rumor to be happening somewhere.
> It might be interesting to find out how high a priority .Net integration
> is and how much support can be obtained from Micro$oft for this effort.
We - the Programming Systems Lab at the University of Saarland,
part of the Mozart Consortium -, have indeed received funding
from Microsoft in the context of an effort called "Project 7",
which involves programming language researchers from all over
the world. Somebody mentioned Mercury before, and probably
meant the following web page, which describes Project 7 and
Mercury for .NET (and mentions Oz):
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/information/dotnet/mercury_and_dotnet.html
Due to our research interests, and to focus our efforts in
evaluating and striving to improve the potential of .NET for
high-level languages, we decided to not port Oz, but a new
language which we currently have in development, called Alice.
Picture Alice as a statically dialect of Oz, in that it
integrates major features of Oz for open programming with
Standard ML - for instance futures, threads, dynamically
linked libraries, pickling, and distribution. Alice is
intended as a new research vehicle on open programming,
while its implementation also targets programming language
teaching.
A running prototype of Alice for .NET (though still lacking
some features), has been presented at Microsoft's Professional
Developers Conference (PDC) in July 2000 in Orlando, where
Microsoft publicly disclosed the .NET strategy. I can provide
more information about Alice on demand, but I'll respect this
list as a forum for discussing about Oz and Mozart ;-)
We are also thinking about participating in the VSIP. This
might cover both Mozart and our Alice implementation. Please
understand that we can only provide more details on this once
the plans have been finalized.
This said, I want to encourage you all to design a new
IDE for Mozart. While the Emacs IDE certainly supports some
aspects of development very well, it only goes so far. It is
more than just about look and feel of the IDE - our current
Emacs-based IDE is definitely lacking in the area of managing
large projects, unless one is willing to go back to makefiles
and command lines at some point. I'll be interested to hear
about your ideas on how this could be improved.
Leif.
-
Please send submissions to users@mozart-oz.org
and administriva mail to users-request@mozart-oz.org.
The Mozart Oz web site is at http://www.mozart-oz.org/.