CIL and dynamic typing - variant is back
I have heard throught the grapevine that the new ECMA CIL "standard" is about to be released. I use the word standard because I'm not sure of the right terminology.
I was able to get my hands on a copy of a few pages of the document through a friend of mine and it turns out that CIL will now support dynamic typing. My source has asked that I not reveal details, but I am allowed to say this: the Variant datatype is back and it is here to stay.
Evidently, there are a few difficulties to implement this in CIL, but the engineers involved had a breakthrough. I'm not privy to all of the details (I only have a few pages), but there was some feature that was discovered in generics that allowed for safe void pointers. My friend stated "We do dynamic loading; why not dynamic typing?"
I haven't been able to confirm this as of yet, but the feature appears to be so important, that the recent PR on the rescheduling of Vista was faked so that this feature could be included in the new operating system.