Cameron McKay

One of the perks of being a freelance programmer is that I get to program in a lot of different languages, either because the client has dictated a certain language, has left the choice up to me, or limited me by what is supported by a host (Hi PHP!).

As fate would have it, I have had the good fortune to have extensive experience with both C# and Java. While many articles will list things a programmer misses from C# while coding in Java (properties, LINQ, reified generics, type inference, named and optional parameters, closures, continuations), this post intends to look at things a Java programmer might miss while coding in C#.

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Channel 9 has posted a great talk by Anders Hejlsberg, the original author of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, and the lead architect of C#.

History lesson: Anders was lured away from Borland by Microsoft with a hefty offer of a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of up to $200,000, and options to buy 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock.

Looks like it was worth it, as each C# release has added many interesting and powerful features, while maintaining a fine balance between complexity and simplicity.

I just added a new Fep section. I’m going to try to work on a bit more (just ordered this sucker) as making a programming language has been something I’ve always had an interest in.

First stop: parsers!

As I was working on the PHP classes that Fep was to map to, I realized that it was rather silly for me to re-invent an API for lists since there were already many well-designed ones in existence. In particular, I’ve found that the .NET 3.5 collections API to be particularly nice to use. Moreover, since everyone and their dog and using .NET now, it would also be familiar to most programmers. Thus, I’ve decided to use a subset of the .NET collections API for Fep collections.

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Disclaimer: This is not the way Fep arrays will work. Refer to the new article on Fep collections for more information.

In this article, I’ll write a bit about how I think Fep arrays will look. Keep in mind this a work in progress and is by no means comprehensive. Without further ado…

In PHP, you define an array using the array() construct. Fep will follow the lead of languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Groovy and use the square bracket [] notation.

Initialization

For example, a simple array in PHP is creating like this:

$arr = array(1, 2, 3);

In Fep, this would be done like this:

arr = [1, 2, 3]

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PHP bugs me. It’s a language with so many inconsistencies, it’s just screaming to be cleaned up. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. That’s why I’m starting a series of articles on Fep, a cleaned up version of PHP.

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