<soap-box> I won't be surprised Java's introduction of Dynamic Proxy is an answer to Hejlsberg's criticism.
I remember when C# was first introduced, there was this interview with Hejlsberg who criticized Java's adaptor pattern and later Gosling responded by calling Hejlsberg the "pointer man". I tried to find the webpages but couldn't. The only thing I found on java.sun.com is a white paper on "About Microsoft's Delegates [vs. Java's inner classes]" http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html </soap-box> Initially, when Berin said he wanted to "generate" delegates, I got the wrongly impression Berin wanted to do code generation. (i.e. Doing what AspectJ is doing now: introduce some new syntax at the language level and do a pre-processing to speak out plain java code.) Now I understand we're actually talking about a thin wrapper of dynamic proxy. I second the idea. Even delegates and inner classes are semantically equivalent at the byte-code level, the "syntax sugaring" offered by C#'s delegates saves a lot of repetitive and verbose code. This leads me to think of a related idea. I used to code in Delphi. In Delphi, creating properties is declarative, not like the tedious and verbose JavaBean setter/getter idiom. e.g. type TMyObject = class(TObject) private FName : String; FAge : integer; procedure SetNameWithValidation(Name: String); property Name : String read FName write SetNameWithValidation; Age : integer read FAge write FAge; Notice the flexibility of allowing binding either raw attributes or methods. I haven't thought it through how this can be achieved in Java (and how to cleanly get around the security manager). But if we can doing the following, it'll be really cool: public class MyClass { private int fAge; private String fName; static { BeanInfoUtils.expose(MyClass.class, "name", "fName", "setNameWithValidation"); BeanInfoUtils.expose(MyClass.class, "age", "fAge", "fAge"); } private void setNameWithValidation(String name) {..} } Then, the properties can be accessed by PropertyUtils: PropertyUtils.setProperty(myObj, "name", "John Yu"); PropertyUtils.setProperty(myObj, "age", new Integer(42)); Comment? -- John At 03:02 am 04-10-2002, you wrote: >Steve Downey wrote: >> From >> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dndevqa/html/msdn_andersh.asp, >> an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the original architect of Borland's >> Delphi, regarding some of the work he had done for the "Windows >> Foundation Classes", part of Microsoft's J++ product, after he jumped >> ship from Borland. >>His work was later adopted into C#. > ><snip type="article"/> > >That was a very interesting read. I'm sold on Delegates as a way of >doing things. We basically did the only thing we could do without >extending the language--although it would be nice to have a JSR for >this puppy. > >I tell you, it will make it alot easier for certain GUI apps.... > >myButton.addActionEventListener( > Delegate.newDelegate( > this, "handleMyButton", ActionEventListener.class ) ); > >And the logic goes in a method: > >public void handleMyButton( ActionEvent event ) >{ > // perform logic >} > >And that's without modifying Swing! -- John Yu Scioworks Technologies e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] w: +(65) 873 5989 w: http://www.scioworks.com m: +(65) 9782 9610 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
