Cω

Monday 21 February 2005 — This is close to 20 years old. Be careful.

Cω (get it? C-omega, the last C) is an extension to C# from Microsoft Research. It provides native XML and SQL support, but more interestingly, it provides new models for asynchrony. In particular is the notion of asynchronous methods, and the even more exotic “chords”. A chord is a method body associated with a number of method signatures. The body runs only once all of the method signatures have been invoked!

Comments

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Damian Cugley 5:06 PM on 23 Feb 2005
There seems to be an informal competition on to create the worst possible C-based programming-language name. C is itslef arguably a little obscure. C++ is an in-joke, hard to type, and creates confusion in the correct suffix for files (.cxx, .C, .cpp, etc.). C# is not even an in-joke, is not actually based on C, and requires that I pronounce # as sharp, or go to the trouble of typing C♯ (U+266F), but if you allow for that, at least it is possible type it; Cω cannot even be typed without resorting to a Greek keyboard or the Unicode Character Palette. What's next? C※? C⤴! Cℵ₀...
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Damian Cugley 5:08 PM on 23 Feb 2005
That said, the chords stuff looks like an interesting way to make parallelism part of the everyday language, rather than something you do with clunky thread library routines. I just wish they could call it something sane, like C with Chords.
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David Boudreau 1:12 AM on 25 Feb 2005
Wasn't there supposed to be programming languages named D, E, F, G etc. by now? At least "omega" indicates some closure (whether or not it's actually the last one is not assured). A refreshing alternative to Ned's earlier post topic about all the open source projects progressing along a slow promotion path... "wait, it's not 110% bugfree, let's keep on tweaking it a few hundred more times."
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Bob 11:38 PM on 2 Mar 2005
C -omega: interesting language, dumb name.

The C Programming language was a sucessor to a language called B. B was a scaled down version of the BCPL language. As the story goes, it's not clear whether the next language would be P (the next letter in BCPL) or D.

I agree with Damian. I'm sick of all of these silly minimalist language names derived from C. Java is syntactically similar to C/C++. They didn't called it C' or C+- or C1996 or whatever.

Advice to the C-omega team: just make up a new friggin name. Name it after your cat, your favorite type of apple, something, anything. Heck, call it Bob. Microsoft isn't using that name for anything these days. :-)
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steven vore 9:20 AM on 4 Mar 2005
in my aggregator the charset somehow got wacked and it came out as "c-," ... then my eyes & brain just followed right along and read the next few words as "get it? C-comma" :-)

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