Hi, Rick!

One thing I cannot understand in whole this discussion. Why not take all advantages of different tools (C#, VFP, VB) and make something common that contains all good features? For example, CLR can take from VFP excellent string manipulation. From VB - some OOP features etc. Finally, we will have some internal-representation universal language. No matter which language we use for programming - VB/VFP/C# or whatever - code will be compiled into the same internal language. I see no restrictions here, maybe I missed something? Why other VFP programmers think that CLR will kill most VFP features?

but expecting a large part of the VFP language/structure to migrate that way is just not realistic due to resources

Why? VFP compiled code ALREADY much like CLR. Why not take other languages and just join to existing VFP compile codes? Is it not more simple than completely rework all codes? Agree, run-time DLLs might grow up in size, but where is complexity here?


>No that's not at all what I meant. The CLR is like a runtime that a language sits on top of. Think of it like the VFP runtime that has yet another layer on top of it which is the language. The language has to support whatever the runtime provides for common structures and constructs. Any other functionality beyond what that runtime provides must be built by building ontop of the runtime (ie. recoding so it works in runtime code as opposed to native code as VFP is). The language implementation can do whatever it wants from there on out, but you it has to be recoded or at the very least wrap existing functionality via passthrough calls. Building the base language is probably something that is quite feasible, but expecting a large part of the VFP language/structure to migrate that way is just not realistic due to resources.
>
>The whole point of the CLR is that the languages sitting ontop of it should be portable. So in theory at least if there ever is a Unix version of the CLR your code runs unchanged regardless of which language it was written in. I can't see that happening really but that's one of the key points .Net makes.
>
>+++ Rick ---
>
>