Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> But, you know, of the several hundred languages available for the Java
> Runtime Environment (JRE) platform, many are still interpreted and remain
> mostly untouched. I don't know how .NET is so different from JRE that,
> unlike for JRE, all square languages should be fitted in round holes.

I've done a little reading into .NET's Common Language Runtime, and I'll
grant that it has some features that make cross-language support
*easier*, such as a unified type system, "struct" types, and the like. 
But nothing I've seen makes the CLR significantly better; it's still
fundamentally single-inheritance classes with interfaces.  That still
makes MI difficult to do without whole-system analyses (hence Eiffel
squeaks by). .NET probably gives ML and Prolog compiler-writers nearly
the same nightmares they had with the JVM, except possibly for the
"struct" types.

J-Ruby, on the other hand, will probably be no harder than
JPython/Jython, and no easier than Ruby .NET.

-- 
Frank Mitchell (frankm / bayarea.net)
"The trouble with mornings is that they come when you're not awake."
-- from "A Window for Death" by Rex Stout