Don Box, Paul Vick and Chris Anderson: Introducing M (Channel 9)

Don Box, Paul Vick and Chris Anderson: Introducing M

Posted: Oct 29, 2008 at 9:58 AM

By: Charles

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7 Comments

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Don Box, Chris Anderson and Paul Vick dig into their new programming language (well, it's a data modeling language that you use to create DSLs to express your data as opposed to a general purpose language...). What is M, exactly? What does it do? What can it do? To answer these questions, Don, Chris and Paul create a Channel 9 language to express Channel 9 video data. Now that's a great idea! Smiley

Tune in, learn the thinking behind M and how to build data grammars with it. It's a very interesting way to program data.

See Don's PDC 2008 session here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL27/

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staceyw Before C# there was darkness...

Oct 29, 2008 at 12:24 PM

Sounds interesting. Is there a link yet to the ctp bits of M?
Charles Welcome Change

Oct 29, 2008 at 1:27 PM

You can find what you need to get started here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/oslo

Play!
C
piersh

Oct 29, 2008 at 5:41 PM

oh dear, yet another yacc...

what kind of grammars does it support. what kind of parsers does it generate?
Don Box

Oct 29, 2008 at 5:54 PM

The underlying parsing runtime uses GLR (Generalized LR).

The M grammar compiler produces structured data that drive that runtime.
Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Oct 29, 2008 at 6:35 PM

Two questions:

1) How long before M can crank out something that's a first-class citizen in Visual Studio? You know, w/ debugging, design-time stuff...

2) I think a perfect DSL is a scripting language, say... for a game. "Mario follows bad guy # 3" kinda thing.... Do I get M as a free product if I buy Oslo?
elmer I'm on my very last life.

Oct 30, 2008 at 2:31 AM

I always screw-up that reply thing... Should be: @Don Box:

Might have a problem with the name.

Although in lesser use now, 'M' is still an ISO-Standard language: ANSI X11.1-1995 and ISO/IEC 11756:1999

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

It is still sold & supported (under various disguises) by Intersystems: http://www.intersystems.com/cache/index.html

It's one of the earliest dynamic type languages, and although a bit clunky by today's standards, still has some features that modern languages struggle to match.

I recall doing a bunch of work in this (and the earlier MUMPS variants) way back when.
Don Box

Nov 07, 2008 at 7:17 PM

Minh,

On the first point, we plan to fully integrate M into VS before we ship.

On the second point, the Oslo SDK (which is how you get M) is a free download.

DB