Eric Gunnerson - How much magic should your compiler have?

Yo Team, when are you guys going to get a microphone for the interviewer?

Should have it next week.

These interviews were done a few weeks back. Sorry about that.

Thanks, Robert. I don't mean to sound ungrateful. These videos are excellent - short, informal, interesting, easy to comment on. A brilliant concept.

In this interiew (at the end) they are discussing closure and the misnomer in C#. Are they talking about Dispose and garbage collection? I am curious because I have implemented IDispose in a couple of objects but now I am curious if it is redundancy for managed code.

clint_hill wrote:

In this interiew (at the end) they are discussing closure and the misnomer in C#. Are they talking about Dispose and garbage collection? I am curious because I have implemented IDispose in a couple of objects but now I am curious if it is redundancy for managed code.

Actually, the question came up because the first time I read about anonymous methods, I was under the impression that the C# team was adding some form of closure to the C# language. After doing a little reasearch, i found out that anonymous methods weren't actually closures at all, but instead just a shortcut notation which the compiler expands. Unfortunately, i can't find the article that showed the compiler expansion right now. If I find it I'll post it. Basically, they create a new class which is designed to hold both the delegate and the locally scoped state of the variables that it uses. Instances of this class are used for delegate assignment.

The concept is not related except tangentially to Dispose or Garbage Collection.

I wanted to bring this point up to Eric while I was interviewing him, but, as you might all suspect, I get a little nervous in front of the camera, so it didn't come out quite as elegantly as I would have liked. As I bumbled my way through it, he made the exact point that I was looking for, Eric rules. My apologies for not speaking up, we'll have mic's on the interviewers soon.

-Bryn

Thanks for clearing that up. I guess I didn't put closure together with anonymous methods. When you have an idea or problem in your head, everything starts to sound like that idea or problem.

"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
 Mark Twain