Where C# Fits In

                                                                                 Where C# Fits In (C#的优点)

In one sense, C# can be seen as being thesame thing to programming languages as .NET is to the Windows environment. Just as Microsoft has been adding more and more features to Windows and the WindowsAPI over the past decade, Visual Basic and C++ have undergone expansion.Although Visual Basic and C++ have ended up as hugely powerful languages as a result of this, both languages also suffer from problems due to the legacies of how they have evolved.

译：C#在某种程度上可以看作是.NET面向Windows环境的一种编程语言。在过去的十几年里，Microsoft给Windows和 WindowsAPI添加了许多功能，VB和C++也经历了许多变化。虽然VB和C++最终已成为非常强大的语言，但这两种语言也存在问题，因为它们保留了原来的一些内容。

In the case of Visual Basic 6 and earlier,the main strength of the language was the fact that it was simple to understandand didn’t make many programming tasks easy, largely hiding the details of the WindowsAPI and the COM component infrastructure from the developer. The downside to this was that Visual Basic was never truly object-oriented, so that large applications quickly become disorganized and hard to maintain. As well as this,because Visual Basic’s syntax was inherited from early versions of BASIC(which, in turn, was designed to be intuitively simple for beginning programmers to understand, rather than to write large commercial applications),it didn’t really lend itself to well-structured or object-oriented programs.

译：对于Visual Basic来说，它的主要优点是很容易理解，许多编程工作都很容易完成，基本上隐藏了Windows API和COM组件结构的内涵。其缺点是Visual Basic从来没有实现真正意义上的面向对象，所以大型应用程序很难分解和维护。另外，因为VB的语法继承于BASIC的早期版本(BASIC主要是为了让初学者更容易理解，而不是为了编写大型商业应用程序)，所以不能真正成为结构化或面向对象的编程语言。

C++, on the other hand, has its roots in the ANSI C++ language definition. It isn’t completely ANSI compliant for the simple reason that Microsoft first wrote its C++ compiler before the ANSI definition had become official, but it comes close.Unfortunately, this has led to two problems. First, ANSI C++ has its roots in a decade-old state of technology,and this shows up in a lack of support for modern concepts (such as Unicode strings and generating XML documentation), and in some archaic syntax structures designed for the compilers of yesteryear (such as the separation of declaration from definition of member functions). Second, Microsoft has been simultaneously trying to evolve C++ into a language that is designed for high-performance tasks on Windows, and in order to achieve that they’ve been forced to add a huge number of Microsoft-specific keywords as well as various libraries to the language.

译：另一方面，C++在ANSI C++语言定义中有其自己的根。它与ANSI不完全兼容，因为Microsoft是在ANSI定义标准化之前编写C++编译器的，但已经相当接近了。遗憾的是，这导致了两个问题。其一，ANSI C++是在十几年前的技术条件下开发的，因此不支持现在的概念(例如Unicode字符串和生成XML文档)，某些古老的语法结构是为以前的编译器设计的(例如成员函数的声明和定义是分开的)。其二，Microsoft同时还试图把C++演变为一种用于在Windows上执行高性能任务的语言—— 在语言中避免添加大量Microsoft专用的关键字和各种库。其结果是在Windows中，该语言成为了一种非常杂乱的语言。让一个C++开发人员说说字符串有多少个定义方式就可以说明这一点：char*、LPTSTR、string、CString (MFC 版本)、CString (WTL 版本)、wchar_t*和OLECHAR*等。

Now enter .NET—a completely new environment that is going to involve new extensions to both languages. Microsoft has gotten around this by adding yet more Microsoft-specific keywords to C++, and by completely revamping Visual Basic into Visual Basic .NET, a language that retains some of the basic VB syntax but that is so different in design that we can consider it to be, for all practical purposes, a new language.It’s in this context that Microsoft has decided to give developers an alternative—a language designed specifically for .NET, and designed with a clean slate. Visual C# .NET is the result. Officially, Microsoft describes C# as a “simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language derived from C andC++.”

译：现在进入.NET时代—— 一种全新的环境，它对这两种语言都进行了新的扩展。Microsoft给C++添加了许多Microsoft专用的关键字，并把VB演变为VB.NET，保留了一些基本的VB语法，但在设计上完全不同，从实际应用的角度来看，VB.NET是一种新语言。在这里，Microsoft决定给开发人员另一个选择—— 专门用于.NET、具有新起点的语言， 即Visual C# .NET。Microsoft在正式场合把C#描述为一种简单、现代、面向对象、类型非常安全、派生于C和C++的编程语言。

 Most independent observers would probably change that to “derived from C,C++, and Java.” Such descriptions are technically accurate but do little to convey the beauty or elegance of the language. Syntactically, C# is very similar to both C++ and Java, to such an extent that many keywords are the same, and C# also shares the same block structure with braces ({}) to mark blocks of code, and semicolons to separate statements. The first impression of a piece of C# code is that it looks quite like C++ or Java code. Behind that initial similarity, however, C# is a lot easier to learn than C++, and of comparable difficulty to Java. Its design is more in tune with modern developer tools than both of those other languages, and it has been designed to give us, simultaneously, the ease of use of Visual Basic, and the high performance, low-level memory access of C++ ifrequired. Some of the features of C# are:

译：大多数独立的评论员对其说法是“派生于C、 C++ 和Java”。这种描述在技术上是非常准确的，但没有涉及到该语言的真正优点。从语法上看，C#非常类似于C++和Java，许多关键字都是相同的，C#也使用类似于C++和Java的块结构，并用括号(｛｝)来标记代码块，用分号分隔各行语句。对C#代码的第一印象是它非常类似于C++或Java代码。但在这些表面上的类似性后面，C#学习起来要比C++容易得多，但比Java难一些。其设计与现代开发工具的适应性要比其他语言更高，它同时具有Visual Basic的易用性、高性能以及C++的低级内存访问性。C#包括以下一些特性：

❑ Full support for classes and object-oriented programming, including both interface and implementation inheritance,virtual functions, and operator overloading.

译：  完全支持类和面向对象编程，包括接口和继承、虚函数和运算符重载的处理。

❑ A consistent and well-defined set of basic types.

译： 定义完整、一致的基本类型集。

❑ Built-in support for automatic generation of XML documentation.

译：对自动生成XML文档说明的内置支持

❑ Automatic clean up of dynamically allocated memory.

译：自动清理动态分配的内存

❑ The facility to mark classes or methods with user-defined attributes. This can be useful for documentation and can have some effects on compilation (for example, marking methods to be compiledonly in debug builds).

译：可以用用户定义的特性来标记类或方法。这可以用于文档说明，对编译有一定的影响(例如，把方法标记为只在调试时编译)。

❑ Full access to the .NET base classlibrary, as well as easy access to the Windows API (if you really need it, which won’t be all that often).

译：对.NET基类库的完全访问权，并易于访问Windows API

❑ Pointers and direct memory access are available if required, but the language has been designed in such a way that you can work without them in almost all cases.

译：可以使用指针和直接内存访问，但C#语言可以在没有它们的条件下访问内存。

❑ Support for properties and events in the style of Visual Basic.

译：以VB的风格支持属性和事件

❑ Just by changing the compiler options, you can compile either to an executable or to a library of .NET components that can be called up by other code in the same way as ActiveXcontrols (COMcomponents).

译：改变编译器选项，可以把程序编译为可执行文件或.NET组件库，该组件库可以用与ActiveX控件(COM组件)相同的方式由其他代码调用。

❑ C# can be used to write ASP.NET dynamic Web pages and XMLWeb services.

译：C#可以用于编写ASP.NET动态Web页面和XMLWeb服务

Most of the above statements, it should be pointed out, do also apply to Visual Basic .NET and Managed C++. The fact that C# is designed from the start to work with .NET, however, means that its support for the features of .NET is both more complete, and offered within the context of a more suitable syntax than for those other languages. While the C# language itself is very similar to Java,there are some improvements:in particular, Java is not designed to work with the .NET environment.

译：应该指出，对于上述大多数特性，VB.NET和Managed C++也具备。但C#从一开始就使用.NET，对.NET特性的支持不仅是完整的，而且提供了比其他语言更合适的语法。C#语言本身非常类似于Java，但其中有一些改进，因为Java并不是为应用于.NET环境而设计的。

Before we leave the subject, we should point out a couple of limitations of C#. The one area the language is not designed for is time-critical or extremely high performance code—the kind where you really are worried about whether a loop takes 1,000 or 1,050 machine cycles to run through, and you need to clean up your resources the millisecond they are no longer needed. C++ is likely to continue to reign supreme among low-level languages in this area. C# lacks certain key facilities needed for extremely high performance apps, including the ability to specify inline functions and destructors that are guaranteed torun at particular points in the code. However, the proportions of applications that fall into this category are very low.

译：在结束这个主题前，还要指出C#的两个局限性。其一是该语言不适用于编写时间急迫或性能非常高的代码，例如一个要运行1000或1050次的循环，并在不需要这些循环时，立即清理它们所占用的资源。在这方面，C++可能仍是所有低级语言中的佼佼者。其二是C#缺乏性能极高的应用程序所需要的关键功能，包括保证在代码的特定地方运行的内联函数和析构函数。但这类应用程序非常少。