Slashdot Mirror
Sneak Peak at Java's New Makeover
SadatChowdhury writes "Aside from templates as already reported in a past slashdot article , a little snooping around revealed the details of the following newly revealed features in the upcoming release of Java 1.5 (codenamed: Tiger) : Autoboxing , Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports . Must read for Java fans."
In related news: jdkane writes "Sun Microsystems delays a much-anticipated Java specification by three months to comply with guidelines designed to keep Web services interoperable. Says Ralph Galantine, group marketing manager for Java Web services at Sun: "We thought that this change was important for the industry, so that there was no conflict between J2EE 1.4 and the WS-I, "We thought it was worth taking out to the summer." It's very refreshing to hear that a big software company is looking out for the industry, instead of just their own."
I am in awe of the new for() statement. Instead of all that fooling around with the C-style syntax (great for procedural, sucks for OO), they just go ahead and adapt it for collections much like iterators in other high-level languages: for (String s : c) { //do stuff on s's in c
}
Wheeeee!
ph34r teh p0w3r 0f th3 c0w
There are some other interesting changes coming to provide a more coherent memory model, vastly improved concurrency support, and intra-JVM application isolation. Java is getting much better at providing access to the capabilities of the underlying OS, and the JVM working more like a little multi-process OS itself...
Larry
"Autoboxing"
Hmm... extremeley Microsoftesque. Much like VB5 and 6's variant data type and C#'s boxing rules.
Seriously, with a language like C you can feel like you actually know ALL the rules, and it makes you feel safe. With the beasts that are VB.net/VB6 and C#, and the one that Java is becoming, you always have that lingering "What If" in the back of your head. Seriously, you end up programming with the idea "Nah, they wouldn't let me make that mistake" constantly in the back of your head.
I for one will like the new features Java is gaining. All too often when programming in Java for school (the main place I use Java), I often find myself wishing and wanting some of the features of C++. I've even gone so far as to write a perl script to allow me to create my own templates and have it convert the template to a proper .java file. Has anyone else resorted to this hack?
On the other hand, Java still is not my preferred language. C\C++ will probably always be my language of choice. They are what I learned first, what I enjoy programming in most, and which I plan to never quit using. Being able to use several design paradigm's is extremely nice, which is why my other favorite language is OCaml. However, I am still picking up its nuisances so things are subject to changing.
I would like to know, however, why the professors at my school bash C and C++. I for one can see the weaknesses of the languages, yet I can also find weaknesses in many other languages including the languages of functional and declarative paradigms. I think a lot of their disdain for C and C++ are due to memory management. However, manual memory management has never really been a huge problem with the way I write my code. Anyone else care to respond on if this is an academia thing to hate C and C++ or just my school? Perhaps all my teachers have their heads on tripods just like the people they complain about. Especially since, they do not work to try and improve the current programming languages.
Reserved Word.
Nothing like a little competition. Notice how we go for years with Sun assuring us that the language is "just fine, trust us, we know what's good for you, you don't, all you need are more libraries, you're not a language designer but we are, trust us, you don't need any more features in the language itself, you just don't get it....".
C# comes out with a better language, and suddenly for the first time since inner classes were added in the mid-90's, the language starts evolving useful C#-looking features....
What I want next from Java is for Sun to invent delegates and properties.
Competition is a wonderful thing, and it's good to finally have some in the Java space.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Most of the new language features are copying or implementing similar to the C# features Sun has persistently decryed!
... same as boxing in C#
... well both languages have/will have generics now ... still not 100% convinced but prefer to have them than not to have them ;-)
... C# has them same as C/Pascal, now suddenly Java is getting them (are they going to revisit the library and clean up a lot of their class constants into enums now??)
... being able to add custom metadata to any method/property, for example how to serialise to XML correctly, is great!!
... competition is great for Java!!!
Autoboxing
the for-iterator [for(Sting s: Collection)] statement is actually "nicer" (in that intent is clearer from the code) in C# [foreach(String s in Collection)]
Generics
Enumerations
I propose they go full how and add the extremely powerful attributes from C# as well
In short
- templates from C++;
- a new style of emun that does everything the Pascal enum does with a syntax that looks like a C enum except that it can have methods, AND MORE;
- a whole new foreach syntax that has the stellar advantage that the syntax doesn't resemble anything on God's green earth except Smalltalk, which is a pure prefix language like Lisp instead of an algol block language like C, C++, Java, C-hash, pascal or Ada (where the other features come from);
- generics using the template model from C++, which was a horrible hack on top of C++ because it was hard to make a backward compatible syntax (so instead we got ANOTHER class of macro to add to the #define) when C++ was a horrible hack on top of C so that at least C++ could compile C programs (except now it can't);
- a grammar that is going to be about LL(497) (doesn't anyone remember how ugly parsing C++ got to do templates, and how long it was before it worked?);
- and a whole wonderful new term ("autoboxing") for the notion that primitive types and class types ought to both have all the properties of types.
I know I'm probably just getting old, but Jesus!, why do we need to repeat all the mistakes of the past?Just like one of the top requests for enhancement in the Java bug-parade states, covariant return types could have done most of the work of Generics without the additional clumsy syntax. (i.e. sub-classes could override return values of overriden methods to return sub-classes of the original return values instead)
overall, I'd rather have this than nothing...
The poster is a little off in calling the new feature "templates", and you're correct in calling them "generics".
Templates were C++'s way of simulating generic types. The difference is that templates are essentially macros in fancy clothing, and generate a different flavor of the class for every combination of type parameters, while generics are a much cleaner, more abstract construct, better grounded in the theory of types, which use polymorphism to achieve their genericity.
Don't know if that made any sense....
In any case, this will be a fantastic feature, and they're done a much better job with it than C++ did with templates.
The colon syntax is not random. It's well-known and well-understood mathematical notation, namely Zermelo-Frankel set comprehension notation:
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});