Major things I notice in the preliminary language spec:
- They're starting to pick up serious elements of functional programming. (The C language family finally moves into the 1990s.) 2.0 gets anonymous methods; 3.0 gets lambda expressions. They're adding type inference, which is almost audacious for a C-family language, although this version still seems pretty simplistic compared to more serious functional languages. (Actually, I think the main point of the type inference is to simplify the syntax of the lambda expressions, and move a bit closer to higher-order functions.)
- New, intriguing concept called "extension methods", which allows class A to declare extensions to class B. Not really a true mix-in capability, but an interesting bit of syntactic sugar.
- Proper object member initializers, fixing a lack that's been conspicuous since 1.0. (They've always had initializers for attributes, but not for real objects; the discrepancy has always struck me as strange.)
- "Anonymous types", which are essentially strongly-typed property bags -- you initialize an object with a bunch of properties, and a new type is created based on those properties. Similarly, implicitly typed arrays, which infer the array type based on the initialized contents.
- A Query language, rather similar to SQL, built into the C# language. It's not specifically DB-based, although it's clearly optimized for that. The notion is basically that, if you have a collection that conforms to the queryable interface, you get a bunch of syntactic sugar for managing those queries.
In sum, I'll look forward to it. (But not as much as to the generics that I'm about to get...)
