RE: Microsoft CLR (was: XSLT 1.1 comments)

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> That sure sounds like Microsoft's definition of cross-platform: it 
> runs on five different versions of Windows.

That is just snippy. All they are saying is that Microsoft isn't in the
business of building services for operating systems other than Microsofts
own. Remember .NET is far more than just the CLR.

> Translation: Somebody might do this, but we won't. And frankly we 
> doubt it's possible. And even if it is possible, we're going to teach 
> everyone to rely on the Windows API that isn't available elsewhere.

Actually no that isn't true at all. {Note I'm not an expert at .NET but then
who besides MS folk are at this point} From what I've heard from MS reps,
this is just not true. .Net is built around frameworks. These frameworks are
OS agnostic but each implementation would have to map its own OS services to
these frameworks. (If you care check out
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL=/library/dotnet/cpref/cpre
f_start.htm)

There are other frameworks that are in the Microsoft namespace which are not
part of the requirements for implementation but they are mostly for
interaction with existing COM componants. 

Your "translation" is also highly unfair. MS isn't really in the business of
creating services for other peoples systems. SQL Server runs only under
Windows (as far as I know) so now they should be building apps for their
competitors? Don't be silly. From what I've heard from MS reps is that they
want people to build implementations for other platforms. They want to see
other languages mapped to CLI (the current list includes APL, Cobol,
Component Pascal, Eiffel, Haskell, Mercury, Oberon, Perl, Python, Scheme,
SmallTalk, Standard ML) they just aren't going to do it themselves. There
are enough other who want to do it. 

To be honest your comments are more akin to "It comes from Microsoft so it
must be avoided at all costs." Not very nice. 

adam

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list