M Past and Present

Let's talk a little about M's past and present.

 

At PDC 08, we introduced M as a way to write down data (Mgraph), schema and functions about that structured data (Mschema), and character parsing into structured data (Mgrammar).

 

Frankly, at PDC, we tried to tell a '1 language with 3 parts' story, but in my opinion it was more like a '2 languages with similar concepts and marketing terms'. Truth be told, those technologies kinda grew up separate.

 

It doesn't matter. We showed the world some interesting ideas, and we saw how powerful it could be to bring the pieces together.

 

We've been working hard at that - at integrating the languages. As I type, some of the smartest folks I know are busy rebuilding the internals of the compiler. We hope to be able to bring all of the parts together as close as we can before the next PDC. I can't wait to illustrate some of the key customer scenarios we expect to get with that integration.

 

Our first step to integrate the language will be visible to everyone in our next CTP drop. We deleted mg.exe, the compiler tool for Mgrammar. Now, you can use a single executable and API to compile Mschema or Mgrammar programs. You still have to have separate file extensions (.mg for Mgrammar, .m for Mschema).

 

We almost deleted mgx.exe as well, but we weren't able to get all of that work done.

 

Now - what happens after we integrate the language? I'll talk more about that in the future. And, I'll talk about other innovations we'll be seeing in the language - some of them before PDC 09, but maybe not until after.

 

Stay tuned.