Hi Prashanth, > I believe that all these kinds of features i.e. base/sub class access > confusion, friend functions were all purposely avoided in JAVA to make > life > simple for the programmers and to get rid of crashes that might possibly > occur on supporting the same.
I agree. The "simple" syntax of Java already creaking under the weight of enhancements such as generics, autoboxing, and varargs already interacting to create subtle "gotchas" - and there's more to come in Project Coin et al. There's a trade-off between intended "convenience" and behind-the-scenes complexity, and I think Java may already be heading for the wrong side of that trade-off. Anyway, Apache Harmony is a Java runtime not a compiler, and the features which are being talked about here primarily concern the compiler. So this would be a matter for an experimental fork of ecj or gcj ... best regards Chris
