Alphonse Ogulla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > C, Erlang, Prolog, Perl, Python and C++ are all refered to in the above > paragraph. Java is conspicuouly not mentioned. I construe that to mean Java > is so much lacking in useful qualities to serve any practical purpose.
Java is garbage-collected, and doesn't have a syntactically explicit notion of pointers or references. This is actually fairly important to me: the big reason I don't use C++ (aside from it having mutated into something unrecognizable since I learned it 10 years ago) is that I can't think about object lifetimes successfully, and don't want to leak memory. Java saves me from doing that. Does calling f(o) make a copy of the object o? In C++, it depends on whether f() takes a reference parameter or not; in Java, the answer is always "no". (The downside is that making a deep copy of an object is a pain.) C++'s big benefit on GNU/Linux, though, is that there are good runtimes that are Free. I've never had good luck using a JVM or class library besides Sun's. This isn't a problem since I work in academia right now, but I could see it being an issue in industry. For Java, maintaining a CLASSPATH is also a big pain. But Java is what I'm using right now, and I think I'm kind of glad that it's not C++. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]