OT: haskell, .net, microsoft and vs

[Nigel Perry]

At 9:31 am -0700 6/8/02, Hal Daume III wrote:
>I apologize for the OT post, but I know there are a lot of @microsoft.com
>people here and was hoping to see if anyone there or elsewhere had answers
>to a few questions...
>
>I know MS has been touting .net as cross language and cross platform and I
>know that at least in many of their talks they mention languages like SML,
>Haskell, OCaml, Mercury, etc. and being developed for .net.  I have a
>vague idea of how the progress is going on these.
>
>What I'm more intersted in right now is this: they have an *excellent*
>development environment (Visual Studio) and have had it for years.  But,
>as far as I know, it is not configurable in the sense that I really
>couldn't use it to develop applications in any of the languages listed
>above -- it supports, C/++/#, ASP, and visual basic, as far as I know.
>
>Does anyone know if either it already does, or if MS plans to support
>other more esoteric languages in the development environment...

Visual Studio can be extended to support other languages, but it is 
not a weekend job ;-) To do this you usually need to join (= buy) 
into VS Integration Program, if you are commercial there are a number 
of quality assurance requirements before you can badge something as 
supporting VS.

Daan Leijen (from Utrecht) did work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 
group to make the job
easier. I am sorry I cannot say whether this work is generally available.

As part of Project 7, a Microsoft project with various language 
developers during the development of .NET a number of languages added 
VS support, ranging from simple syntax colouring and "makefile" 
project support to full integration. Mondrian, the simple functional 
scripting language, was one of these which I undertook, it's at the 
simple end. However I did not also add support for Haskell (I did a 
partial port [not speed optimised and many libraries missing] of GHC 
to .NET using Mondrian as a backend). Other languages integrated 
include Fortran (Salford), Cobol (Fujitsu) and Component Pascal (QUT).

HTH,

	Nigel

-- 
Nigel Perry, New Zealand