David --

From a website comparing C# and C++ -- update on templates in C#

"The designers of C# must have considered templates during their design process. I suspect there were two main reasons for not using templates. The first is messiness - templates can be difficult to mesh with object oriented features, they open up too many (confusing) design possibilities for programmers, and they are difficult to work with reflection. The second is that templates wouldn't be very useful unless the .NET libraries like the collection classes used them. However, if the .NET classes used them, then the 20+ languages which use the .NET classes would have to work with templates too, which may be technically very difficult to achieve.

It is interesting to note that templates (generics) are being considered for inclusion in the Java language by the Java Community Process. It may be that each company starts singing each other's tunes when Sun says that ".NET suffers from lowest common denominator syndrome", and Microsoft says "Java doesn't have cross-language support".

(Amended 10 August) From reading an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, it appears templates are on the horizon, but not for the first release, for the difficulties which were suggested above. It was very interesting to see that the IL specification was written so that the IL code could represent templates (in a non-destructive way so that reflection works well), while byte-code was not."


>David --
>
>Thanks for your perspective.
>
>Speaking of linked lists, I was wondering about algorithm libraries. But, as I recall, C# doesn't support templates, so that rules out something like the STL which gets around the strict typing of C++ in the implementation of algorithms.
>
> Jay