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F# to Be Integrated With Visual Studio

by Jonathan Allen on Oct 18, 2007 |

F# is a highly influential language from Microsoft Research. It is based on the ML family of languages, but also incorporates concepts from C#, LINQ, and Haskell. Running on the CLR, it can leverage any .NET library.

According to Somasegar, "[Microsoft's developer division] will be partnering with Don Syme and others in Microsoft Research to fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#." This means F# will be treated as a first-class language on the .NET platform.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has introduced a language other than the big three, Managed C++, C#, and Visual Basic, to the .NET platform. J#, a clone of Java 1.1, and JScript.NET had compilers but limited or no Visual Studio support. More recently, IronPython and IronRuby compilers were added as open source projects. What makes F# unusual is that it is the first language to be based primarily on Functional Programming rather than some form of Object Oriented Programming. The last non-OOP language from Microsoft, aside from T-SQL, is the venerable xBase language, FoxPro.

No timeline has been set for this initial release, but it most likely will not be with Visual Studio 2008.

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Not exactly Non-OOPS by David Leon Posted

Visual FoxPro is OOP, is not .Net by Hank Fay Posted

Not exactly Non-OOPS by David Leon

Hate to quibble, but F# is an functional-OOPs hybrid language. It is not strictly function, as is the case with ML or Haskell. Although I can't claim I know the language yet, I am studying the subject, and I have defined standard CLR classes in F#.

Visual FoxPro is OOP, is not .Net by Hank Fay

Perhaps this is what you meant, but just in case. Visual FoxPro has been elegantly OOP since 1994. It is not .Net-based, i.e., it doesn't run on the CLR. There is a version being built (www.etecnologia.net) to compile into .Net, with some examples here (groups.google.com/group/vfpnet-compiler-communi...), but this is all non-Microsoft driven.