Yeah, but they're all varieties of mold, mostly in the mini fridge.

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.

Well, that's begging the question. We don't *know* that Senator Markey or anyone on his staff are illiterate; we only know that they aren't as careful with proofreading as they could be.

That said, I'll attempt to answer your question: because he (or his staff) is raising a serious, important point. That's not enough for you to listen to him? It's not enough that he served thirty years on the House Committee on Communications and Technology either? He (and his staff and the secretarial pool in his office) have to be *infallible* in matters of proofreading before you'll listen?

Ah yes, the culture of "zing". It's much more important to catch a politician (or more likely, one of his staff) in a typo than to pay attention to the substance of what he's written.

My hat's off to you. You, sir, are obviously a genius.

Imagine this sequence of events:
1. A perfectly legal subpoena is issued for someone to appear as a witness, while they're a plane's flight away from home.
2. Put witness on no-fly list.
3. Cite witness for contempt of court for failing to appear.

Yeah. No.

For example: Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45(b) requires that you serve the person with the subpoena. If you wait until they're away from home, you're going to have a much harder time finding them. Not a complete barrier to the scheme, but ask your lawyer friends how much fun it is to track down someone who cannot be found at their nominal residence or place of business. They will have stories. They will not be fun stories.

Also, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45(d)(1) provides that:

A party or attorney responsible for issuing and serving a subpoena must take reasonable steps to avoid imposing undue burden or expense on a person subject to the subpoena. The court for the district where compliance is required must enforce this duty and impose an appropriate sanctionâ"which may include lost earnings and reasonable attorney's feesâ"on a party or attorney who fails to comply.

That rule doesn't appear to apply here because I understand that this was a party witness, not an opposition or hostile witness who you'd compel to attend using a subpoena. Instead, Judge Alsop is likely to cite "the inherent authority of the Court" (to conduct proceedings and sanction parties who unreasonably interfere with those proceedings). But if you're the government, or a party that fraudulently causes the government to put someone on the no-fly list, that Rule would apply to shennanigans involving any witness that you were compelling to attend.

Boom, you now have a tool for the intelligence community, with the help of a friendly (or blackmailed) judge to put anyone away they like, for any reason they like, at least for a little while.

No. Because contempt of court typically requires an intentional act, and typically is used as a threat by that judge to gain compliance. If you were to show up ready to testify, you very likely would not be jailed for contempt merely due to the fact that you've voluntarily showed up. If you can also show that you were actively impeded from showing up, you almost certainly would not be jailed for contempt.

At worst, you could be arrested where you were stuck, temporarily jailed, and extradited to the state/court that issued the subpoena. Slightly traumatic, but remarkably quick if you don't oppose the proceedings. Better yet, the authorities attempting to extradite you will rather quickly find out that you are on the no-fly list. Unless they're part of the 'grand conspiracy' too, that tends to work against the scheme.

Of course once you start theorizing as to "friendly (or blackmailed) judge[s]," you can come up with all sorts of whacky crap. Like a Federal judge ignoring the typical requirement that a subpoena cannot demand attendance in less some number of days (related to Rule 45(d) -- try to issue a subpoena requiring attendance the next day and see how enforcable that will be) and the laws of physics somehow preventing you from getting a train ticket, bus ticket, or rental car allowing you to return home within the typical required 'waiting period.'

Too much Hollywood. Not enough real life. Courts tend to work slowly and methodically. Judges tend not to throw away their careers on petty crap, and with the exception of a very few (Supreme Court types) remain answerable to a host of other judges. Actual long-term jailing for contempt is relatively rare and exceptional. You would do well to focus your conern on your local LEOs and prosecutors, who really can screw up your life with very little cause.

Special Relativity: you can get an intuitive understanding of this. I did. It takes a lot of unlearning of basic concepts. Simultaneity is a killer, and creeps in everywhere.

General Relativity: every description I've ever seen either includes a lot of handwaving and generality, or is based on tensors, which I personally just don't get intuitively. I know what they are, and something of how to use them, and what they represent, but the intuition just isn't there.

Higher level dimensions: the only possible intuitive experience I've got with that was doing some odd mind exercises as a teenager, in which I have a distinct memory of imagining four mutually perpendicular lines simultaneously for a very short time. I couldn't hold the imagination long enough to verify it, and I'm not sure I'd trust my memory completely when doing weird stuff like that.

Note that infinities and singularities can be a feature of the mathematical description rather than reality. For example, any mapping of a sphere to a plane will have at least one singularity (the usual latitude and longitude has singularities at the 180th meridian, including North and South Poles), but the ground or water or ice or whatever there doesn't have any special properties).