Excellent Article on the Concepts behind C# 3.0

Thomas Petricek has written a very interesting article on the new concepts behind C# 3.0 (here). It shows the origin of many of the functional programming features found in C# 3.0 from Cω and F#. Having explored a little of the code that backs up the functional programming aspects, I understand that although the extension run with the basic features of C# 2.0, there is a huge amount of C# code required to deliver the functional paradigm to C#. Most of that code provides complex code generation, type inference and declarative programming support.

In the first section on first class function support – I found on closer inspection (within LINQ at least) that these first class functions, are actually delivered through calls to the DynamicMethod method of System.Reflection.Emit. If you disassemble its code, you’ll see that the relationship between the imperative and functional programming in C# is through ‘runtime support’. The functional programming extensions are a runtime extension to the CLR that generates code to fulfill declarative requirements. That is – there’s no new radical paradigm at work in the core code, but the way it’s exposed will simplify things so much that it might as well be called a new paradigm.

Well worth a read.