Anders Hejlsberg interview on support for XML and SQL in C#

Anders Hejlsberg, the MS Distinguished Engineer who has pioneered several important programming languages including Turbo Pascal and C#,  has an interview in InfoWorld that is well worth reading for anyone interested in how .NET  is evolving to support XML and relational data.

 C-Omega is a research project that explores language extensions in a couple domains. One is database integration, the other is XML. And C-Omega was effectively sort of conceived as, let's take C#, let's try and take SQL, let's try and take XML or XQuery and let's all sort of put them into one big bowl and stir and see what comes out of it, experimenting with integrated queries and so forth ...

And we've learned a lot from that prototype, and we are now working to apply a lot of that knowledge in C# and our other programming languages. ...

So what we're looking at is really trying to much more deeply integrate the capabilities of query languages and data into the C# programming language. And I don't specifically mean SQL, and I emphatically don't mean just take SQL and slap it into C# and have SQL in there. But rather try to understand what is it expressively that you can do in SQL and add those same capabilities to C#.

Keep a close eye on this:  Some brilliant people who have made major advances software development in the past are thinking hard about the nasty object-relational-XML impedance mismatch and how to address it in the future.  Lots of interesting things are going to come out of this.  

Mike Champion