In Python, "exceptions" is really a misnomer - they are a generic non-local return flow control tool, there's nothing exceptional about them - and the VM design reflects that.

The C++ standard doesn't even have a concept of a "binary" (or, for that matter, "dynamic linking").

The price for that is the major pain that using countless macros to implement your "classes" is in GObject, where the same thing in C++ is literally a single line of code.

Whether D is something that's "done correctly" is, shall we say, extremely arguable.

CIL is low-level enough that a fully conformant ANSI C compiler can be written to target it. It has raw pointers, structs, unions and stack allocated arrays. It also has some things that C does not (like guaranteed tailcalls). All of those are highly efficient. I honestly don't know what else you could possibly need to write a compiler for whatever language you are interested in.

It sounds like you've only actually looked at C# and VB.NET, which are, indeed, largely the same thing with slightly different syntax.

But have you actually looked at IronPython? It's not "just syntactic sugar", it's a full fledged Python implementation that has every single language feature that regular Python 2.7 does (it doesn't have the entire standard library, but there's no reason why it couldn't).

Long story short, your argument is false because of the point above. CIL is flexible enough for any language to target it without the need to adapt it. You may need language extensions if you want to interop on object model level (i.e. classes and objects, rather than primitives and structs), but it's not a requirement.

You can add Java if you want - that'll be IKVM. It's JVM-bytecode-compatible, even (it dynamically translates it to IL).

P/Invoke is basically the typical C FFI that many other platforms possess, with all the same advantages and disadvantages. .NET fares better than many on that front because the type system is flexible enough to closely match that of C with no need for translation (has pointers, structs and unions). That (and JIT compilation) is largely why it can be so low overhead.

IntPtr, aka "native int" (in IL), as the name implies, is not 32-bit - it's architecture dependent, and matches the size of the native pointer, like intptr_t in C99.

That isn't really true. Most of Microsoft's own "heavy applications" use it, heavily in fact. Both Office and Visual Studio use it a lot, especially the latter.

Yes, it's slower than .NET-to-.NET, much less native-to-native. But any bridge is going to introduce overhead, when either side speaks a different language, utilizes different data structures etc. In that sense, P/Invoke is actually pretty slim, because so long as you use "blittable types", i.e. primitives and structs thereof - basically things that have the same bit representation in .NET as they do in native - calls are direct, with no marshaling overhead at all, it's literally a CALL instruction emitted by the JIT.

Yes, it's all the Democrats fault. The republicans are pure and never do anything wrong.

Incorrect. There are plenty of bastards in both wings.

It's just that often when you have a bad apple on the Democrat side, you are told it's really applesauce.

While with Republicans you are told it's pure cyanide.

Both are wrong, but one presents Democrats in a favorable light.

As if we needed yet another reminder, this shows us in all sorts of ways how bad big government really is. Either they abused the list to keep a witness out, or they really COULDN'T tell she was on the list which means the list is an utter unmanageable clusterfuck.

Either way this is the result when government is allowed to grow too large and too powerful, abuse and mismanagement grow exponentially. Remember this come any election, always vote for the guy that wants to give you less, not more.

Journalists have for years been censoring information - roughly 90% of them are Democrats (really statists), and many are loathe to present any Democratic official in a negative light. Stories negative to Democrats or the expansion of federal government are usually buried, any chance to pillory a Republican (or non-statist like many libertarians) is sized with glee.

So it's not hard to imagine that people already heavily censoring work would expand what they decided to censor. It's also hard to be sorry for them.

On the other hand, over thousands of people and many years the overall theft adds up to a lot if left unchecked. So perhaps a correctly proportionate response to deter all future theft is exactly what happened, punish one guy a bit harshly while telling everyone else this is wrong.

I don't know what is is but much of Slashdot seems morally challenged today.

If they visit your website because they want to see what is there, you cannot charge them.

If they know that visiting your site will cause it to crash and thereby do you harm, then yes un theory you could charge them (although probably not taking reasonable precautions would get that thrown out).

Friends don't let friends listen to metal....

Still, better than rap...