> This is kinda off topic but I've been musing lately about a preprocessor
for
> Java. One of the early attractions to me about Java some 5-6 years ago
> coming from a mostly C++ background was that there was no pre processor
and
> obfuscation, so Java code was very easy to read.
>
> However in theses groovy days of having Ant to do all our building, JUnit
> for unit testing and the various logging packages for logging, we rarely
> need much from an IDE these days but a basic editor (does anyone even use
> debuggers any more?), so maybe diverging from the Java Language spec
> wouldn't be too bad. .
But using a decent IDE such as Eclipse* eliminates the need for all that by
automating the generation of boilerplate code using templates. Using a
pre-processor to avoid typing code is pretty pointless, IMHO. Just get a
better tool.
Where pre-processor type activity *is* useful is for adding things like
generic types - in other words, where you are changing the semantics of the
code by enriching an existing concept. Having a generic (parameterized)
type means that you can enforce type-safety of of single-type collections,
e.g. declare a list of Strings that will throw an exception if you try to
add an Integer. JSR-14 is working on this already, so it could be
counter-productive to come up with something similar.
Okay, I'm being a bit harsh - the JavaBean property example is valid
enough, as is the event listener. I think the main thing is to distinguish
between shortcuts just to save typing (like the foreach) and real patterns
(like events and properties).
Another proposal that is more like your "syntactic sugar" usage is JSR-65 -
concise object array literals, which would convert:
ArrayList al = new ArrayList({ "foo", 10, 0.75});
into:
ArrayList al = new ArrayList(new Object[] { "foo", new Integer(10), new
Double(0.75)});
* Yes, I know there are other good IDEs out there. Emacs JDE, for example.
I believe there also something called NutBones or something like that :-)
Regards
Colin M Sharples
I/T Architect
IBM Global Services New Zealand
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 64-4-5769853
mobile: 64-21-402085
fax: 64-4-5765616
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