[Mono-list] FYI : Mono on the MSDN site

[Brad Wilson]

James Michael DuPont wrote:

>> For the sake of many mono-hackers: "generics" is something akin to C++
>> templates, but that can also expand AT RUNTIME with FULL TYPE-SAFETY.
>> That would make possible to have typed ArrayLists, as we now have typed
>> arrays.

> That sounds interesting. Is it in the C# ECMA spec, i did not see that
> yet.

It's not in the specification, and it's not in the platform. At this point,
it's only been worked on my the MS Research team. It is anticipated that the
support for generics will be added to the _platform_, and that generics will
be expanded at runtime. Then each of the languages that wish to support
generics will need to have their syntax updated (including C# and VB.net,
although it would be nice if C++ could keep its existing generics syntax for
use with .NET). The original research information is available at [1].

I have not heard any public information about the planned feature-set for
.NET v2, so this is speculation on my part (backed up with discussions and
e-mail, but in the end, still just my gut instinct).

Brad

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/projects/clrgen/

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