Mono, anyone?

[Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal dot net>]

Has anyone considered taking advantage of Ximian's (Novell's?) Mono
project?  I remember seeing a presentation on Mono by Miguel de Icaza at
LinuxWorld in San Francisco last year, and it sounded like it would
allow us to do some interesting things.  For example:

* Allow Xconq to talk to a other application.  This may initially sound
silly, but imagine how much easier it might be to play games such as
bellum.g if you could use a spreadsheet to represent various aspects of
your empire (particularly such things as supply of 'c') using charts. 
It might not be quite so bad for Xconq to behave (to some extent) like
an office application.
* Write different parts of Xconq in different languages.  This might
make it easier to add scripting capability to Xconq (it might even make
it possible for Xconq to support all the scripting languages that have
been discussed so far).
* Make it easier to support all of the platforms that Xconq is supposed
to run on.

I don't know how well compatibility between Mono and Microsoft's .NET
framework stands, and it wouldn't really surprise me if Microsoft
changed .NET to make Mono incompatible.  However, I imagine that, even
if Microsoft pulled the plug, that Mono would still be a useful tool for
the reasons I listed above.