As a fan of languages like ML, I'm really excited about the new features in C# 3.0 that have been announced in this PDC.  But one thing that always concerned me about great swathes of ML code was the readability of that code.

If I’m working in a function and I see, for example:

    var x = f();

then what other kinds of operations can I do with x? It turns out the type-inferencer is much smarter than I am!

In ML this is mitigated partially by the REPL (read-eval-print loop) which allows me interactively ask the compiler what the type of things are. But C# has no analog to this, AFAIK.

I was discussing this issue with a colleague today and I said, "I’m scared about having to read the C# 3.0 code that my coworkers write." He said, "I’m scared about other people having to read the C# 3.0 code that I write!"