[Mono-dev] gmcs and The Future

[Avery Pennarun]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Scott Peterson <scott at ssblack.co.nz> wrote:
> So what is (are) the killer feature(s)? I would be interested in
> organizing a forum for proposing and discussing language features. If
> for no other reason than as an excuse to talk about language design
> with smart people. This forum could start as an informal bake-off of
> ideas and brainstorms. If momentum builds behind a particular feature,
> we could formalize a proposal for its inclusion in the compiler. This
> allows the exploration of many ideas without the looming specter of
> feature-creep.
>
> If other people are interested in geeking out over language features,
> I suggest we get ourselves a little organized. We could hold forth
> right here, on this list, or we could create our own Google Group.
> Bugzilla is maybe another option. Maybe. Thoughts?

I may not have a lot to contribute, but I would enjoy reading such a forum :)

Have you looked at uservoice.com?  It's not open source, but it's free
to use, and their UI is really excellent for handling feature
suggestions.  Of course, in an open source project, feature
suggestions aren't nearly as valuable as working implementations of
those features.

FWIW, I really like Miguel's idea to have Ruby-style inline string
substitutions.

And my own idea: add support for "# line" style preprocessor tags, as
produced by cpp.  I have a few programs that need to run through cpp
before compiling, and the lack of "# line" support means that (unless
I'm almost impossibly careful and do some strange tricks) the line
numbers reported in error/warning messages will be screwed up by the
preprocessor.

(The reason I use cpp, incidentally, is so I can implement C-style
assert() and check() macros that actually print the condition being
tested as part of the assertion message.  There seems to be no other
way to do this in C#, which is too bad.)

Have fun,

Avery