Geekery: Xen

[jducoeur]

Fond though I am of hating Microsoft (due to its excessively aggressive business tactics), I have to admit that Microsoft Research comes up with remarkably cool ideas from time to time.

Computer language geeks should check out this article on the hypothetical language Xen. This is basically a collection of extensions to C# to make it much more usable for data processing. In particular, the article describes how to extend C# to make it really, really easy to use it for XML processing; along the way, they almost casually make it easier to embed SQL processing as well.

Of course, the annoying thing is that the chances of actually seeing this language come to market are slim -- MSR comes up with any number of great ideas that the Monolith never actually gets around to selling. But I can hope -- I suspect these concepts have ramifications well beyond XML processing...

Comments

Not so sure about the XML part...

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Call me a heretic, but I'm not as thrilled about XML as some people. As a result, I wasn't expecting to be all that excited...but I was wrong. Wow. They really got my attention with:

string* titles = bib.books.title;

I mean, that is an amazingly powerful construct, and one that I've actually wanted in the past. It's the sort of operation I have in my head sometimes, when I have to write out the explicit code for it; being able to make it a one-liner would be fantastic.

And then they throw in the functional style with:

sequence{string; int;}* bs = AWBooks.{return new(it.title, it.year);};

Fantastic. Oh, and yield; that would be an amazingly useful bit of shorthand. I've worked a bit with lazy-evaluation sequences in Scheme, but having explicit language support for them would be so much more useful.

Re: Not so sure about the XML part...

[jducoeur]

I largely agree. I *do* care about good XML integration (my current project is using highly customized XML for data transport, so better integration would be a godsend for me), but what really struck me was the generally flexible attitude towards the data. I could easily see myself using a lot of those capabilities even when I wasn't using XML per se.

I concur that yield will be lovely: fortunately, that's the one bit that I actually expect to have available to me in the relatively near future. It's one of the near-term (although not nearly near enough) enhancements planned for C#, coming in sometime this year. They're adding it in order to make it easier to write enumerators -- C# currently makes it very easy to *use* enumerators, but it's a mild pain in the butt to define them. Yield makes that near-trivial. That, plus the addition of a good generics model, will make me *much* happier in my day-to-day programming. (Generics being the one feature that is glaringly lacking in the first version of C#.)

In general, I've gotten very fond of C# and the stuff growing up around it -- it's become my favorite general heavy-lifting language. Xen might well take that to a whole new level, so I'm rather hoping that the boys in the front office pay some attention to it...