On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Luke Palmer wrote: > Also, the "standard library", however large or small that will be, will > definitely be mutable at runtime. There'll be none of that Java "you > can't subclass String, because we think you shouldn't" crap.
Java's standard class library is a mishmash of things that represent containers (variables) and things that represent values (and even some broken things that try to be both), with no syntactic help to distinguish them. And its syntax reserves "const" but doesn't use it for anything. As long as we have "is rw" and its friends, we can -- with suitable care -- make sure that a subclass of a value-representing class is also a value-representing class, so there's no semantic need to say "never any subclasses" but we can still do CSE and other neat stuff at compile time. Of course having a "no subclasses" tag means the compiler can change a method call into a direct subroutine call, but I would hope that method calling will be fast enough that it won't need to. Will we require methods in subclasses to use the same signatures as the methods they're overriding? -Martin -- 4GL ... it's code Jim, but not as we know it.
