If Miguel de Icaza Did Not Exist, We Would Have To Invent Him

I said so to Miguel tonight, and I’ll say so to you, too. The man never ceases to amaze me.

A couple days ago, Miguel blogged about the Interactive C# Shell, a piece of minor awesome–a read-eval-print shell for C#, using chunks of Mono’s gmcs compiler. Not a lot of use to me, but very cool nevertheless. Tonight, though, we get the woah-cool part (which follows quite logically from the interactive C# shell): C# Eval: An Embeddable Compiler. This is way cool, and for me it replaces what I’ve been stuck using IronPython for. And since it’s licensed under the X11 license, all those cheap-and/or-poor people like me can use it for our dastardly deeds.

I ask–nay, demand–that you all tell Miguel that it needs to be named Miguel’s CSharp Evaluator. The reason is, of course, obvious and painfully punful.

Tonight after I get home from work, I’m going to see if I can get gmcs to compile from SVN (it’s happily downloading away on my home server) and I’m going to see about adding to it a feature that is of serious use to me, and probably others. When you use IronPython, you can tell the PythonEngine to compile a string or code file into an object, rather than immediate execution. I plan to attempt to bring this CompiledCode functionality to the C# tool Miguel put together here.

Many thanks, Miguel!