Walter: > Java made a related mistake by failing to acknowledge that > value types have any useful purpose at all (unless they are built-in).
Java was designed to be simple! Simple means to have a more uniform semantics. Removing value types was a good idea if you want to simplify a language (and remove a mountain of details from C++). And from the huge success of Java, I think the designers were right (later C# has added values too, but C# is indeed a more complex than Java). The Java VM also is now often able to allocate not escaping objects on the stack (escape analysis) regaining some of the lost performance. What I miss more in Java is not single structs (single values), but a way to build an array of values (structs). Because using parallel arrays is not nice at all. Even in Python using numPy you may create an array of structs (compound value items). Bye, bearophile
