F# 3.0 has added type providers.
I wonder if it is possible to add this language feature to other languages running on the CLR like C# or if this feature only works well in a more functional/less OO programming style?
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F# 3.0 has added type providers.
I wonder if it is possible to add this language feature to other languages running on the CLR like C# or if this feature only works well in a more functional/less OO programming style?
As Brian and Tomas point out, there’s nothing particularly “functional” about this feature. It’s just a particularly slick way to provide metadata to the compiler.
The C# design team has been kicking around ideas like this for a long time. There was a proposal a few years before I joined the C# team for a feature that was going to be called “type blueprints” (or something like that) whereby a combination of XML documents, XML schema and custom code that proffered up type metadata could be used by the C# compiler. I don’t recall the details and it never came to fruition, obviously. (Though it did influence the design and the implementation of the Visual Studio Tools for Office document format, which I was working on at the time.)
In any event, we have no plans on the immediate horizon for adding such a feature to C#, but we are watching with great interest to see if it does a good job of solving customer problems in F#.
(As always, Eric’s musings about possible future features of unnannounced and entirely hypothetical products are for entertainment purposes only.)