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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 2 Nov 1999 11:15:30 +1100
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Canon Information Systems Research Australia
From:
Geoff Bull <[log in to unmask]>
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Tucker Taft wrote:
>

> Just-In-Time compiler technologies, which tend to be buggy and
> not that much of a speed improvement,

Java has a lot of flaws, but a buggy JIT compiler
(Sun JDK 1.2, Solaris) is not one of them.
JIT is what makes Java useable at all.

Perhaps you are thinking of Hotspot?
Or maybe other platforms are not as good as sparc?

Is this pick on Java day?

The decision to leave unsigned primitive types out
of Java was a terrible decision.
(well ok, a char is unsigned, but it is only 16 bits)
This is the most common cause of bugs in my code,
by a very wide margin. And all those masks in my code to
prevent sign extension are ugly.
Ok, my application is atypical.

Another annoyance is int and long are "superior" to
other numeric primitive types. e.g.

       int  y = 5, z = 6, x = y + z;
       long y = 5, z = 6, x = y + z;

are both legal, but

       short y = 5, z = 6, x = y + z;
       byte  y = 5, z = 6, x = y + z;
       char  y = 5, z = 6, x = y + z;

are all illegal, and must be written


       short y = 5, z = 6, x = (short) (y + z);
       byte  y = 5, z = 6, x = (byte)  (y + z);
       char  y = 5, z = 6, x = (char)  (y + z);


Cheers
Geoff

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