Article:		Miguel de Icaza Explains How to "Get" Mono
Subject:		Other language support?
Date:		2005-03-21 18:14:05
From:		timharig
One of the great promises of .net/mono was that it was going to be available to many different languages. This is somewhat true for the Windows platform where the developement languages are limited anyway but seems like C# is the only real option. Perl, Python, C, and C++ are the most prevelant languages to unix communities but I have not seen any real implimentations or even the planning for them to come out of mono. I think even Windows has a Perl.net somewhere? It is not unreasonable to assume that programmers of these languages would appreciate some way to develope for the mono/.net VM with bindings to their libraries. It also does not seem like something unreasonable to do. Python already has a simular relationship with Java through JPython. If Perl can be revampted to use Parrot then why not mono on the open source arena? I have been watching mono for some time. I like the ideas behind it but have held back because I do not C# the language any more then I like Java. When I want a systems language I use C/C++ when I want a scripting language I use Python and I am not really fond of blended languages like C#/Java. I often write code for the JVM with JPython to avoid using the Java language. When will somthing like this be ready for mono?

Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.

• Other language support?
  2006-02-22 20:43:37  reillyuser2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  See Boo as an alternative language for Mono.
  http://boo.codehaus.org/
  

  
  It's rather Pythonesque, and the compiler is also extensible.

• Other language support?
  2005-03-23 14:18:33  riffraff [Reply | View]
  
  
  I think the theorical support for multiple languages on top of the clr has not been very exploited till now.
  See http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2005/03/21/8041.aspx
  for a nice view of how VB was changed to fit the CLR specification.
  It seem to me that the usual joke "you can run every language on the clr, as long as it is C#" has a great part of truth.

• Other language support?
  2005-03-23 08:05:48  ______________________ [Reply | View]
  
  
  See http://boo.codehaus.org/
  
  It has a very simple python-like syntax, but has the functionality that languages like C# and ruby have, such as closures, interfaces, optional type declarations, type inference, duck typing, etc. Since it is statically typed it is as fast as C# code.
  

• Other language support?
  2005-03-22 09:02:55  simon_hibbs [Reply | View]
  
  
  Iron Python is what you're looking for:
  
  http://www.ironpython.com/
  
  It targets both .NET and Mono, but is still in the early stages of development.
  
  Simon Hibbs