"T.J. Duchene" <tj at genesiswireless.us> wrote: > Personally, I wish that as a group we programmers could force a > binary middleware on the industry, so that applications would be OS > independent. Ah, yes. The pancea of application design, OS agnosticism. Unfortunately a problem that isn't likely going to be solved, ever. Why? The problem with trying to design binary middleware is that EVERYONE has to agree upon what is best for EVERY problem set. That means commercial acceptance as well. Designing this type of wide-application virtual machine is HARD. If you won't accept Java or .NET, Parrot is a good example of this type of effort. It will be the Perl 6 virtual-machine implementation of choice, and it's gaining momentum in hosting other languages. Who knows if it'll gain commercial acceptance at all, even if it does become useful to the FOSS world. http://www.parrotcode.org/ http://www.parrotcode.org/languages/ -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */