csharplang VS dotnet-script

Certain parts of Microsoft Learn are permissive, for example the .NET BCL documentation is Creative Commons Attribution: https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet-api-docs as is ASP.NET Core: https://github.com/dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs (a good hint if documentation is permissively licensed and on GitHub is if there's an edit button at the top.)

The C# language specification is unfortunately a bit fuzzier: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/4855

The updated unified C# language specification is CC, but it's still catching up to modern C#: https://github.com/dotnet/csharpstandard

No OP, but for example you still see the C# folks still struggling to add discriminated unions to the language because of complex interactions due to its too many features[1]. Virtual threads are easier to use than async/await is another example.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/113

For example, C# had a research fork called Spec# that had compile-time support for contracts, with keywords such as requires (for arguments) and ensures (for return values), all the way back in 2004. While still being discussed, it doesn't seem to be shipping any time soon.

Hi there. I'm the language designer who created the 'Collection Expression' design/specification: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/5354

You can see the entire history of the proposal there. To answer you specific question, we went with `..` because that's what the language already uses for the complimentary 'pattern matching deconstruction' form for collection patterns.

In other words, you can already say this today:

    if (x is [var start, .. var middle, .. var end]) { ... }

You must specify concrete type.

There was a plan to have "natural type" so "var list = [1,2,3]" would be of type "List" but it was postponed to C# 13 (https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/5354#issuecommen...)

While C# currently lacks direct support for this kind of functionality, there's a glimmer of hope with an active proposal under discussion that aims to bring this feature to the language. This potential addition promises a future where C# can natively offer similar robust type narrowing.

Given few people anticipated ValueTuple and C# adding a more direct tuple syntax, I feel like it is only a matter of time before C# adds discriminated unions.

(There are multiple proposals tracking the idea. This seems the most comprehensive and "central": https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/7016)

I always liked list abbreviations in python, but I absolutely love Linq. I believe there is a feature proposal for C# 12, which makes collection initialization better imo.

Especially because these languages are only one package/install away and not two. I don‘t really get for which audience is targeted here. Usage in JS projects maybe, but then why not write it as npm tasks. ..

I‘m playing around with dotnet-scripts [1] at the moment (C# shop mainly) and this has the same issue imho. The reason why I looked into it was because we have developers not accustomed to bash etc. I still find it silly and would rather use ruby so…

[1] https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script

>making powershell actually enjoyable to use

My solution was to stop using it and instead use dotnet-script

https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script

Scripting with the full power of modern C# has been a huge win for me. And same/similar scripts will work on Windows/Linux/Mac. As my work language is C#, I don't have to context switch to another language for scripting.

I usually create a container that has all database migrations and tool to execute those migrations. I name migrations as [yyyyMMdd-HHmm-migration-name.sql] but please feel free to use any naming scheme, keep in mind how the tool would order multiple files to run those migrations. I have also added a wait-for-db.csx file that I would use as the entry point for database migrations container. This is a dotnet-script file and would be run using dotnet-script. I have pinned the versions that are compatible with .net sdk 3.1 as this the version roundhouse is build against at the time of writing.

thanks, this is very good idea too, and with dotnet-script we can publish executable out of the script!

It sounds like this is feedback for the author of the dotnet script tool: https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script

Yes, you can have single-file scripts too. There might be more options to achieve this, but the one that I use is running *.csx files via the dotnet-script (https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script).

I do agree.

I think .Net has got it right. And dotnet-script [https://github.com/dotnet-script/dotnet-script] has been a game-changer for me with a REPL-like experience for unit testing and writing command-line utilities.