Don Box, Paul Vick and Chris Anderson: Introducing M

The Discussion

• 

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

• 

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

• 

  oh dear, yet another yacc...
  
  what kind of grammars does it support. what kind of parsers does it generate?
  

• 

  The underlying parsing runtime uses GLR (Generalized LR).
  
  The M grammar compiler produces structured data that drive that runtime.
  
  
  
  

• 

  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?
  

• 

  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.

• 

  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