[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > I'd be interested to hear of other reasons for Java's requirement to > intern all literal strings and constants.
Backwards compatibility. At this point we can only conjecture as to why Java was originally defined this way. My guess is that this decision was made in the early days when the language was being targeted at embedded computing and machines with not a lot of memory. Having the JVM do interning of literals could save enough memory to matter. The world has moved on, and nobody thinks much about conserving string space these days. But there are enough programs out there that rely on this historical quirk that it is too hard to change ... even if it was thought to be a worthwhile thing to do. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list Classpath@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath
