Hi,
I'm the author of the Cobra programming language. I didn't write the
statement about it being intrinsically bound up in the .NET framework.
In fact, I'm the guy who started two additional back-ends for JVM and
Objective-C, as well as the refactoring necessary to support this.
These are not complete, and I would love any and all help with these
efforts. If you're interested, let me know. (Cobra is open source
under the liberal MIT license.)
In the mean time, Cobra runs on Novell Mono (which I use on Mac and
Linux) and Microsoft .NET.
You can learn more about Cobra at
http://cobra-language.com/
-Chuck