Chapter 2

Most of the information on this and other chapters refers directly to material in Wilson, L.B. and Clark, R.G., Comparative Programming Languages (Third Edition, updated by R.G. Clark), Addison-Wesley, September 2000, ISBN 0-201-71012-9.

The material is intended to supplement the textbook by providing further examples and discussion. It is not self-standing, but assumes that you have a copy of the book to hand.

Section 2.7 Special-purpose languages

Scripting languages

An introduction to various scripting languages has recently been published.
The World of Scripting Languages, D Barron, John Wiley.

Section 2.9 Modules, classes and abstract data types

Java and C#

C# is a new language that has been announced since the book was written. In many ways, it is similar to Java in that it was developed as a simplification of C++ and is intended to provide good Internet facilities. The major difference is that Java was designed to be platform independent while C# is being developed by Microsoft and is very much tied to their environment, especially to their new .Net networking framework. Both languages compile to intermediate code, but with C# that is so systems may be composed from components written in the different languages supported by the .Net framework. However, it can be argued that writing reliable code in one language is hard enough without the extra integration problems that result from mixed code.
The statement-level syntax of the two languages is almost identical with the control structures being taken straight from C. In other respects, C# is closer to C++ than is Java. For example, it retains operator overloading and structs which do not exist in Java. However, C# has followed most of the simplifications that Java has made to C++. Therefore it has single inheritance (with interfaces providing most of the facilities of multiple inheritance), threads, exception handling, automatic garbage collection and the safe handling of references (with no pointer arithmetic, except that C# allows the programmer to go into `unsafe' mode).
The advantage of C# for a Windows developer is that it will integrate well with other Windows tools and languages. However, the platform-indepence of Java coupled with its current wide acceptance will make it difficult to supplant. Only time will tell whether Microsoft's control of the Windows platform means that C# will become a major rival to Java.