• bearophile (8/8) Dec 11 2008 Seeing how much D borrows from Java, I think you may be interested in se...
• Sean Kelly (6/7) Dec 11 2008 pointers. References look more doable).
• Nick Sabalausky (8/11) Dec 11 2008 This is something Java desparately needs, as damn near everything in Jav...

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Seeing how much D borrows from Java, I think you may be interested in seeing
some of the updates of Java:
http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com/2008/12/java-7-update-from-mark-reinhold-at.html

Some of the most interesting changes:
- Safe rethrow - Allows a broad catch clause, with the compiler being smarter
on what you're allowed to rethrow based on what is thrown from the try block.
(I had not seen this before but it looks nice) (I don't understand how this can
be done).
- Null dereference expressions - Null checks with '?' syntax similar to
Groovy... lettign developers avoid a nest of null checks. (This will probably
come in D too, sooner or later).
- Compressed pointer 64 bit VM (This is very useful, but I think it's not easy
to do in 64-bit-D with pointers. References look more doable).

Bye,
bearophile

Sean Kelly <sean invisibleduck.org> writes:

== Quote from bearophile (bearophileHUGS lycos.com)'s article
 - Compressed pointer 64 bit VM (This is very useful, but I think it's not easy
to do in 64-bit-D with

pointers. References look more doable).

Compressed pointers would just have to be a new type.  But it's more
likely that we'd just create a struct for this in D, seeing as how we
have opDot now.


Sean

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:ghrj09$205a$1 digitalmars.com...
 - Null dereference expressions - Null checks with '?' syntax similar to 
 Groovy... lettign developers avoid a nest of null checks. (This will 
 probably come in D too, sooner or later).

This is something Java desparately needs, as damn near everything in Java is 
nullable. I'm not sure I would argue against it in D, but I would say Java 
has much more of a need for it than D does. I was looking at the 
ANTLR/StringTemplate code a few weeks ago (it's written in Java) and there 
were so many null checks all over the place that I felt like I was looking 
at code from the time before exceptions replaced errors-as-return-values.