I often have to use C# 2.0 because that's the version that the SQL Server 2005 CLR understands. It turns out not to be so bad since you still have closures (in

I often have to use C# 2.0 because that's the version that the SQL Server 2005 CLR understands. It turns out not to be so bad since you still have closures (in the form of anonymous delegates), generics, and user-defined operators. Generics and user-defined conversion operators are powerful enough to nicely simulate Haskell's type classes (or Scala's traits), which, in my opinion, is a bigger deal than higher-order functions and 3.0+'s version of “type inferencing”.