class Car extends Vehicle

Some requests:

This might be far off. If you intend to continue this series, do some thing with GTK# and MonoDevelop. That’s really when Mono starts to shine IMO.

Show how to make a plugin for Gnome-Do. Make sure to this the open source way(tm) by picking up someone elses plugin and learning from it or modifying it to do something else. In fact thats how most Gnome-Do plugins are made!

Let’s not just stop at C#? Mono can do more. Show off the Boo language too. Boo is a really cool CLI language and in my opinion doesn’t get enough love.

Eventually you could get into Vala too. Vala is a C# like language but it compiles directly into native code. I’m quite interested it in myself.

@Author: One thing that can be odd about static typing if you come from for example Python, is how the runtime type of objects can be different from the compile time (static) type and what the effects of that are.

Here is a simple example in Java. Put in “Demo.java”, compile with “javac Demo.java” and run with “java Demo”:


public class Demo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Inspector i = new Inspector();

class Vehicle { public String toString() { return "Generic vehicle"; } }
class Car { public String toString() { return "Generic car"; } }
class Inspector {
public void inspect(Vehicle v) {
System.out.println("Inspecting vehicle: " + v);
}
public void inspect(Car c) {
System.out.println("Inspecting car: " + c);
}
}


I’d one up you with a similar Cobol example:) but I don’t want folks to scratch their eyes out. (Notwithstanding, I happen to love Cobol myself, despite my disparaging it). In any case this quote is great:

“One of the worst and best parts of these languages is that they are dynamically typed.”

I feel the same. it is very convenient to just start working with variables, without declaring them. On the other hand I love Cobol and other languages’ typing, and especially languages that require declaring the variable first. Too many times Ive mistyped a var, and having it declared has informed me of this on compile.

A question about C#, is it case sensitive? That’s another bugger point with me with some of these languages.

Thanks.