On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
One major reason is that it allows languages to be mixed and to call
easily from one language to another. Free software dropped the ball
on this (Parrot), and
Mono/.Net is the only widely available
implementation of this idea.
It was *marketed* as such, but in fact many different languages have run on
the JVM for a long time:
http://www.robert-tolksdorf.de/vmlanguages.html
Some of them date to 1996.
Practically speaking there are many modern languages available such as
Objective Caml:
http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/
Ruby:
http://jruby.codehaus.org/
Python:
http://jython.org/Project/
Scala:
http://www.scala-lang.org/