Linked by Rüdiger Klaehn on Thu 5th Aug 2004 05:00 UTC
One of the most awaited features of Microsoft .NET 2.0 is generics. Generics promise to increase type safety, improve performance, reduce code duplication and eliminate unnessecary casts. The most obvious application of generics in the framework class library are the generic collections in the new System.Collections.Generic namespace. Much has been written about those, but they are not the topic of this article.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Yes, Lisp macros are vastly more powerful than C++ macros + templates, but in the end, both are mechanisms that allow changing of program behavior at compile-time. Meanwhile, "dynamism" allows changing of program behavior at runtime. The two mechanisms have nothing to do with each other --- you can have fully static languages with a macro processor (Ocaml with Ocaml4P), fully dynamic languages with no macro processor (Smalltalk), or fully dynamic languages with a macro processor (Lisp). That's really why I think the author's statement was weird --- templates being compile-time macros have nothing to do with the dynamism of the underlying language.