What language is microsoft's software made in?

[Adrian]

hey every1,

plz could someone tell me what language microsoft is made in?

thanx

Adrian.

p.s. i was ment to say what language is microsoft's software made in as the topic title

[Adrian]

was microsofts first OS written in fortran? or basic?

[_Pablo]

what's f# :blink:

Check out the F# FAQ @ Microsoft Research - in the words of Tony the Frosties tiger, "They're grrrreat!".

[azcodemonkey]

Clarification to recent press reports about F#: Despite reports to the contrary, F# is a relatively small research project designed to demonstrate that it is possible to easily implement ML-like languages for use on the .NET Framework. There are no current plans to commercialize F#, and the source code for the F# compiler is due to be published in June 2003. F# is public, on-going research, and Microsoft Research regularly and openly collaborates with universities on programming languages. There has been a long tradition of implementing ML-like languages within research laboratories as these have been widely accepted as foundational languages for programming language research, including the Caml project (encompassing both Caml-light and OCaml), New Jersey ML, Moscow ML, Dependent ML and many extensions to Standard ML. The implementations have often proved useful in practice, and are often used for teaching the foundations of programming.

from that site... not a production language, just research.

@Adrian - It is assumed and generally accepted that the Windows OS is a combination of C and C-wrapped assembly(ASM), but no one is 100% on which parts are what. The overlaying services( not apps ) are probably a combination of C/C++ and bits of ASM. MSDOS, which the original Windows ran on top of, came with a BASIC interpreter called QBASIC... actually, there were two predecessors to QBASIC, BASIC A, and GW-BASIC. QBASIC showed up in MSDOS 5.0, arguably, the best MSDOS version as 6.xx never really added much. The original DOS, QDOS, was written in assembly by Tim Paterson.

[_Pablo]

Weenur: I realised that F# is a research project (hence it's prescence on research.microsoft.com) but C# was once a research language named COOL (I think it stood for Common Object Orientated Language). However I just added it to the VB/J# as their all equally unlikely candidates IMHO!

Adrian: Weenur is right - if you consider the NT family of windows (NT3.x/NT4/2000/XP/2003) the kernel is written mainly in C with some well fenced off assembly, this made it more portable (remember NT was originally written for the i860 - AKA N10 hence NT which MS marketing later declared stood for New Technology). However all recent non-kernel work (the shell, services etc) seems to have been built on COM, and this is almost certainly written in C++. Anywhere where MMX/SSE extensions et al can improve performance significantly, Microsoft will probably have specific assembly sections for processors capable of supporting these extensions.

[azcodemonkey]

Weenur: I realised that F# is a research project (hence it's prescence on research.microsoft.com) but C# was once a research language named COOL (I think it stood for Common Object Orientated Language). However I just added it to the VB/J# as their all equally unlikely candidates IMHO!

How true. :D