WARNING: This is a speculative post. Caveat emptor.

I haven’t finished reading through all the comments from my previous post yet, but I did think it was worth stating that we are considering improvements to lambda expressions in the next version. Specifically, we’re looking at allowing single-line lambdas that don’t actually return anything, something like:

Dim x = Sub() Console.WriteLine(10)

This was something we wanted to support in 2008, but just ran out of time for. We’re also thinking about multi-line lambdas that contain statements instead of just a single expression. So something along the lines of:

Dim y = Function(x)
            If x > 0 Then
                Return x
            Else
                Return -x
            End If
        End Function

Like C#, we’d infer the return type of a multi-line lambda by attempting to pick the best type of all the Return statements.

This is really a common request, so it’s definitely something we’re strongly considering.

WARNING: This is a speculative post. Caveat emptor.

It’s been a while since I’ve had much of anything to say about our thinking about VB10 (well, it’s been a while since I’ve had much of anything to say) and I wanted to give a quick update on our thinking:

• Implicit line continuations: we’re still considering it.
• Automatically implemented properties: we’re still considering it.
• Implicitly implemented interfaces: we’ve put this on the back burner. The feedback we got on my post was helpful in identifying problems with the idea and it seems like we have bigger fish to fry.
• Collection initializers (and update): we’re still considering it.

We also keep getting asked about:

• Iterators. This is definitely on our radar but it’s a big item. We’re considering it, but it hasn’t been thought about nearly as much as some of the other things above…

Another thing that is on our radar:

• Generic variance. I’m not even going to bother to post our thinking about this, since you can always go over to Eric Lipper’s blog and read his extensive discourse on generic variance.

And, of course, other stuff that will be talked about in good time…