C# as a Meta-Language for Target of Language Translations
C# and Java are often presented as being similar languages, separated by commercial concerns and stickiness to independently developed platforms more than intrinsic differences in technical paradigms.
This talk makes the case that there is more to this difference than meets the eye, as C# includes features that would be considered harmful if they were to be used by developers for newly written code, but make a lot of sense in the specific context of language translations, where the syntax and the semantics of the original system must be represented in the target language, minimizing entropy in the process.
The domain of language translation, and the specific challenges of this domain will be presented, to put C#’s specific capabilities in this area in perspective, and to show how Java, while usable as a target language in theory, would fall short and would result in less appealing translated systems.