Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

> Java byte codes are powerful enough that you can run anything on that. 
> But a series of languages will be very hard to support efficiently (C,
> C++, Fortran in one end and Haskell and Lisp on the other one).

You can support C efficiently in Java byte code.  Fortran even more so,
not that anyone in the fortran world would care[1]. Lisp is already available
efficiently on java, as is python and even cobol and APL.

> As I said, Microsoft took Java and went to language vendors and asked
> `What do you need me to add to make your work simpler'.  And that turned
> out to be the CIL.

Which adds instructions that allow compilers to be written more easily at
a horrible cost in run time execution efficiency.

Alan
[1] Fortran programmers write code to do a job and do it fast and right.
The only portability issues they care about are numeric precision ones and
neither CIL nor the JVM addresses them