Templates and generics

Brandon Bray provides an excellent summary of the difference between templates and generics. That is, templates as in C++ and generics as in C# and the .NET Framework.

When I first heard about generics I was told they were similar to templates and I couldn't help but wonder how that would be implemented. It seemed like a fairly difficult thing to do without giving up a lot of the benefits of templates or cross-language support. But generics appears to be much more different from templates than I thought, and significantly less powerful.

Perhaps I should read a bit more about this .NET stuff. The hype has been putting me off, but there are no doubt interesting ideas in there that I can learn from.

26 November, 2004