To Peter

Does the book cover Java Tiger features?

Hi Pradeep
I saw the book's reviews on Amazon & the reviewers have said that it does cover Tiger (J2SE 5).

Peter,

I would also like to know your opinion about static import in Java Tiger. I feel that it should not have been introduced.

Java 5 introduces enhaced for loop. Why did Sun not use a new keyword foreach for this enchanced loop.

Yikes! What a lot of questions, Pradeep.

Let me take a few minutes to give my thoughts.

First, YES! Just Java 6th Edition has full coverage of the Tiger features, J2SE 5!
As a matter of fact, when I was researching the book, I got interested in how, and how
much Java had changed over the 6 major release it has had, and I put together a chart
to help me understand it. Then I thought that readers might be interested in that
information too, so I put it into JJ6, in the Preface to be precise.

Second, static import - as you point out, it was not strictly necessary, you could go on
using the long form of static names. Or the language rules could even be changed to
allow the effect of static import without the "static" keyword.

I had a long discussion with the compiler-writer at Sun responsible for the design
choices in this case. He was of the view that the best tradeoff was to help programmers
see which names are static members of a class. I have got a lengthy discussion of this
on page 126 of Just Java 6th Ed, if you have a copy handy. So agree with it or not, that
is the reasoning.

I'll come back to the question of enhanced for loop as it raises some interesting issues.

Cheers!

Peter

Since there are a lot of arguments about this static import feature in Tiger, do u think that they will consider eliminating this feature in the next release of J2SE 5.1 or sthing? Or is it just a small weak point of Tiger that we can ignore it? :roll:

Pradeep, me and Nick, discussed about it one time, when we were in the last book promotion about Mr.Herb's Tiger book... I can still remember it... It's good that we can get opinions from great authors like this...

Thanks the Ranch for such a great opportunity, which we cannot get elsewhere...

Or is it just a small weak point of Tiger that we can ignore it

Java 5 was supposed to make Java stronger but..

Thanks for the reply Peter!
Why is your book titled "Just Java"? :roll:

Peter,

I also have a question regarding Autoboxing. It reduces the code but comes with a performance price. Dont you think that we should avoid using it.

Also, == operator behaves differently for primitives and Object datatypes.
Please give us your thoughts on this.

Thanks

Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
Also, == operator behaves differently for primitives and Object datatypes.

It should behave differently, shouldn't it? == operator is overloaded in the JLS and they would behave according to the type of the operands...

Or do u want to mean some other things, Pradeep?

Originally posted by Ko Ko Naing:

It should behave differently, shouldn't it? == operator is overloaded in

That is the problem.
http://jroller.com/page/eu/20040705#autoboxing_surprises

quote:
I also have a question regarding Autoboxing. It reduces the code but comes with a performance price. Dont you think that we should avoid using it.
===========================================================================

Avoid doing it in a loop.

Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
Peter,

I also have a question regarding Autoboxing. It reduces the code but comes with a performance price. Dont you think that we should avoid using it.

Also, == operator behaves differently for primitives and Object datatypes.
Please give us your thoughts on this.

Thanks

Regarding performance I was refering to the last example in the link below
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/autoboxing.html