Clean, Java and the Microsoft ".NET" platform...

[larisys]

We are a high-tech electronics company planning to use modern higher-order 
lazy functional languages with static polymorphic typing and modular 
compilation for the development of our new softwares. As Windows is the 
main platform we are targeting, we are at the moment favoring Clean over 
Haskell98 because of the ease of use and setup of the compiler and IDE on 
Windows platform.

We are presently learning the language and experimenting with the 
educational-licence free compiler v1.3.2 and find both to be excellent 
tools. We are worried, however, about investing money and software 
development effort in a proprietary language that is not supported by a big 
company, nor backed by a large base of user's as are open source projects 
such as Haskell98.

In a private mail reply, Pr. Rinus Plasmeijer explained that the sources of 
the Clean 2.0 compiler would be open source. If such is indeed the case, 
needless to say that we will adopt the tool.

Can the Clean development staff give us some date for the delivery of the 
new Clean 2.0 compiler, and its status as an available free open source 
software ?

A related question concerns the availability of back-ends for the Clean 
compiler for the following platforms :
SUN's Java Virtual Machine.
Microsoft's ".NET" next generation of Windows services. ( see 
http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/net/ )

We know for instance that :
The "Mercury" team at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/ announced 
the delivery of a back-end targetting the ".NET" platform.
Haskell compilers targetting ".NET" are cited in articles about ".NET".

Is such a back-end planned for the Clean compiler ?
What is the position of the Clean development staff regarding microsoft's 
".NET" platform ?

Though we can't for the moment officially commit ourselves to a definitive 
choice, we are contemplating using Clean for the superior development tools 
it offers on Windows platforms, and its closeness to the Haskell98 
language, in case a source port would be necessary...

Best regards, Fabien TODESCATO