[1068] in java-interest
so much to do, so little time...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Cimarron Taylor)
Thu Aug 17 23:20:37 1995
From: Cimarron Taylor <cimarron@acgeas.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 17:42:40 -0700
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
cc: cimarron@irvin.acgeas.com
Some thoughts..
Java is an excellent piece of software engineering.
I want to see it become widely accepted and available. I'd
like to see a software economy emerge in which Java has many
independent suppliers of runtimes, compilers, and development
tools.
One thing I like about Java is that the overall "rules" are
broken occasionally for very good reasons which in general do
not hamper its acceptance. For instance, Java has base types
as well as objects, and + is a syntatic shorthand for string
concatenation. I think these exceptions are ligitimate because
they have made it easier for me to get started with Java.
Adding generalized operator overloading is un-necessary, and
will not improve the language. In some places it already
suffers from too much overloading (e.g. "."). The mailing
list correspondence demonstrates that the existing overloading
of "." is slowing the efforts of Terrance and John to develop
a Java parser.
To put it simply, nothing I am doing now with Java would
improve if Java had overloaded operators. I'm afraid that
adding them will only diminish its acceptance by slowing
development efforts.
I think removing the existing operator overloading, and
resolving some of the other ambiguities could speed the
development of further tools which will improve its overall
acceptance more than adding more operator overloading will.
Cimarron Taylor
cimarron@acgeas.com
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