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Language extension proposal

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gary Howland)
Mon Nov 27 08:02:00 1995

Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 02:13:08 +0100
From: Gary Howland <gary@kampai.euronet.nl>
To: java-interest@java.sun.com

I noticed recently that there are some discussions still going on about
extensions to the Java language.  I thought I would just take this
opportunity to suggest a few of language features that were missing from
C in the hope that they may be incorporated into Java.

One language feature that I would very much like to see would be a
"rotate" instruction - ie. a shift with wraparound.  Another feature
that I would like to see would be some sort of access to the carry
flag.  Another would be a way of determining the number of "1"s in
a word, and another would be a way to determine the topmost "1" in
a word.  These are features that are extremely useful in some areas
of programming (eg. low level graphic programming, cryptography
and comms), and would be very easy to implement.  I guess that the
main objection to such extensions may be due to resistance to add
more operators or syntax to the language, but I am sure that any
users would have no objection to using a built_in_bit_twiddle()
function if that is what it takes to get these into the language.
Just think - Java will then be able to outperform C in some areas!

Regards,

Gary Howland.
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